༺( E l s a )༻
by Otherwise Uncolonized
Summary: "This lissome blonde will entertain men as told, albeit with little evidence of ᗪᕮSIᖇᕮ or sexual interest. To be easily colonized by this woman is to end your own life." But is Hans's ironbound courtesan a coy victim or a cold villain? In a world where decadence has been kinged by Nazis, casino owners, and prostitutes, a smutty thief tries to pick both of their locks. #SᒪOᗯ ᑭᗩᑕᕮᗪ
1. ༺(The Nowhere Man)༻

**[** 웃유|웃 **]**

* * *

Now then, _this_ is a story about a woman who just wanted to be _free_...

And somewhere between her ambitions and my intentions, two narcissists quote-on-quote "fell in love" with her.

Of course, this is just a cheesy opening made to dumb down the truth and **you** , but it's not the whole picture. Part of me doesn't really want to remember what the whole picture was, but my prison shrink told me that I'd get some closure from regluing the edges of this framework with the bloody sawdust she left behind. I'll even say some things are worth revisiting, such as the long nights of creaking mattresses and mind-blowing fellatio.

But most of it's not.

Now before you look down my microscope, allow me to say this:

Don't pity the "trapped woman" or the "sexually confused husband" you see under the lens. {They're actually bacteria}

...Pity **me**...

* * *

 **[** 웃유|웃 **]**

* * *

 **CHAPTER ONE:**

 **"The Nowhere Man"**

* * *

"I regret to inform you that Mr. Weselton is snowed in, but if you could have a seat beside the Doulton Lambeth, I'll ― Sir? _Sir,_ please put that down! Yes, _you_! That Sancy Diamond is a historic French jewel from Viscountess Astor herself!―Erm, please forgive me, Mr. Rider. As I-I was saying, I'll do my best to fetch Mr. Weselton for you, but―"

"Say _no_ more," a flamboyant voice flutes. "Take _all_ the time you need. I won't―move―an _inch_."

"...Oh, _bless_ you, Mr. Rider. You're such a selfless person. Once he's been unhitched from his current business, you'll be escorted down the hall on the button. Just remain here until that time."

" _Will_ do."

"Then I'll see you again in a little while, Flynn Rider."

"... _And_ I'll be looking forward to it, Mrs. Hayworth." The cad in a Fedora hat and bronze eyeglasses clicks his nails together as he watches Mary Janes scutter away from him.

Their nut-numbing owner uncrowned Hedy Lamarr on his "100 Best Looking Keisters list," but those heart-stopping rubies in her earlobes have no dethroners. The cakes on that caboose, on the other hand, are the reason he believes that God has a penis. They splay against her chair like pudding as she mounts its lucky face with the aplomb of a queen ascending her throne.

Content with her padded pedestal, Mrs. Hayworth crosses her thighs and unhooks the ringing telephone from its base plate. "Hello," she tootles, "you have reached the director's office of Weselton's Auction House. How may I be of service?"

Habit makes him look at the cleavage ballooning out of her blouse. One heave of her luscious breasts stretches the buttons wide enough for him to appraise the amethyst gleaming in their dell. She strokes the glade of skin above those village feeders to smear the sweat under her necklace, giving all three goodies an oily sheen.

 _'Good LORD.'_ His eye tics. Sobriety is a priority for him, but her jewelry is melting his cerebral cortex into mayonnaise.

"Hello, you have reached the director's office of Weselton's Auction House." Mrs. Hayworth's red fingernails walk down her leg. "What can I do for you today?" The fingers stop at her knee. "... Sverre and Schleswig-Holstein?" She grips the candlestick telephone with both hands. "D-D-Did you have an _appointment_ , Your Grace? No...?"

The sound of a bell clanging in the parlor propels her admirer to spring up from his seat faster than a sprayed cat. Mrs. Hayworth stuffs her laughter back into her mouth. After landing back on Planet Earth, Mr. Rider uses his pinkie as a plunger for his ear. He only pauses to peek over his forehead and blink at his spectator with the cuteness of a baby seal.

Mrs. Hayworth holds her nose between her palms before lowering them to ask, "Are you alright, Mr. Rider?"

"Eheh..." He grins apologetically. "I'm...um...AHEM...I'm ― I'm fine." He nods, composing a look of seriousness after he closes the front of his Glen plaid suit. "Just a little, um...just gonna be a little _deaf_...for the next thirty six hours or so, but, t'uh.. _.y'know_ ,"―he slaps the air―"no biggie."

At the drop of a pen, workers flood the waiting room like wildebeests being sardined into a trench by lions. Mr. Rider considers putting his feet up on the sofa after almost losing a leg in the stampede.

"Ah!" A man spanks the stem of his palm as he separates from the herd. "Is Mr. Weselton still gnawing off the ear of that despicable German, Mrs. Hayworth?"

She covers the telephone's carbon microphone. "Afraid so, Mr. Cromwell."

"On his birthday? God bless the Devil. Well, let him know that his nephew wishes to speak to him immediately. See to it that you get it done."

"Certainly, Mr. Cromwell."

"―Oh, and..."―the man proceeds to whisper behind his hand―"did you hear about what happened to the Sri Lankan sapphires of Duke Jean le seconde d'Orléans?"

"It's been the talk of France for days, Mr. Cromwell. I think we've all heard it."

"It's a tragic situation. I pity Queen Marie-Amélie's family."

Mr. Rider watches the employee mince across the parlor with a clucking tongue. His crocodile shoes are tackier than a pimp's, but his wristwatch could have bought Rider's schooner. The longer he observes the cavalcade of desk-jockeys, the deeper he envies their privileges. Like its breadwinners, _Weselton's Auction House_ is one of the most prestigious workplaces in Goldwater, which means that the paychecks are fatter than White Castle's hamburgers. The Jacobean architecture gilding its entrails is reminiscent of the galleries in Kensington Palace, and its auctioneers have preserved such opulence by toadying to bougie capitalists right through the Great Depression.

Yet underneath the clacking Mary Janes, cap toe oxfords, and leather wingtips, quakes a moral structure with loose tiles, and he's about to shovel out his share of the gravy that's been trickling down their grout―

"Mrs. Hayworth, is Mr. Weselton in his lair?"

Mr. Rider's ears twitch. An appetizing vision of long legs in black fishnets parks in front of Mrs. Hayworth's desk. He scrolls up the sweetmeat's calves. From the back, her body favors a pasta noodle in a handkerchief skirt. The bell-shaped cloche hat on her head is a trademark accoutrement of flapper girls. Her pelt and emeralds may have surpassed six hundred alone, but the real temptress is that marquise-cut wedding ring blinking on her finger as she places her clutch bag on the counter.

He estimates eighteen carats between seventeen to twenty thousand dollars. The spinning slot machine in his head hits $30,000 with a ka-ching. Next, he prices her emerald teardrop earrings, followed by a thorough inspection of the sable capelet scarfing her shoulders, and then he concludes that she is a mobile bank vault his tongs need to avoid.

Mr. Rider scrubs the dirty thoughts out of his head to exorcise his demons. _'Pause. **Meditate**. Breathe. Don't want this. You don't **need** this. You didn't come here for theft; you came here for trade.'_

"Mr. Weselton is making a very important business call―"

"Then I can wait, Mrs. Hayworth. I always do."

"It'll be an hour, madam."

"An hour is fine. That'll be more than enough time for Jean to finish inseminating his mistress." The posh totty sounds pleasantly unbothered. "He has bad knees, you know."

An awkward silence umbrellas the parlor, but Mrs. Hayworth still grins like her face was molded that way. "You can choose a seat anywhere in the parlor, ma'am."

"Thank you, Mrs. Hayworth. I'll do just that." Mrs. Posh Totty pivots around on the black heel of her oxford shoe, flashing Mr. Rider with the assets he craves to motorboat. Her emerald rivière necklace, mulberry silk blouse, black bolero jacket, and elbow length gloves confirm her breed right down to the genotype. This tigress is in all likelihood a politician's wife. Such a pussycat is a class act he knows well ― a pedigree he makes it his business to know ― and he knows enough to say that her whole getup can purchase a villa on Pluto.

Last year, his alter ego would have moaned, _'If only you― **knew** ―all the― **things** ―I―could― **do** with you.'_ Today, his superego, however faintly the thing flickers, is wrestling in mud and rain to keep his alter ego muzzled. He sinks back into his loveseat and folds his hands on one knee, mocking the posture of a gentleman. The object of his addiction sits down beside him to ransack her purse. His nerves ignore her, but his conscience is partitioned between temptation and temperance.

Two exhales later and Mr. Rider is almost certain that he has his butterflies corked until the stopper explodes off the jar after her thigh grazes his. As barbiturism starts to overcloud sobriety, _Eugene Fitzherbert_ is left slapping the glass with the heels of his hands while _Flynn_ _Rider_ takes the helm of his handsome vessel.

" _Ahem_..." Flynn cants into his prey's personal bubble, careful not to actually pop it. "Pardon _me_ , but..."

The ex-flapper, who is surely the last of her species, paws a bleach-blonde curl off her cheek to properly receive him. Topaz eyes that twinkle with the brilliance of Marie Antoinette's Angouleme Emerald Tiara grade his looks incuriously. She possesses the mouth of a Japanese geisha and the nose of a sparrow, but the overall visage screams eighteen year old Loretta Young at her finest.

Flynn Rider keeps his eyes on his knee, as if to be lost in a search party for his words, before touching her elbow pit. "And I hope I'm not being too _forward_ or anything when I say this, but, um..."―the grifter ambushes her with a smile, rolling his eyes all over her moles in false captivation―"after years of collecting parures, your impeccable beauty just might be the best I've seen in all of Goldwater."

A smile inches across her cherry face. She turns her eyes down to snort through her teeth, shaking her head as she fiddles with her necklace. "...Thank you, I―..." She clears her throat and modifies her reaction. "That's all very kind of you, monsieur, but the tastes you're complimenting belong to my unfaithful husband." The sex kitten capitalizes "unfaithful" like it's the punchline of a joke, conspicuously knowing that he's talking about her rock. "It's just a shinier replacement for the first declaration of enslavement after it was stolen seven years ago."

" _Stolen_ , you say?"

"Ripped _right_ out of my hotel room," she twitters.

"Oh _no_..." Flynn curves his eyebrows like a mourner. "So sorry to hear that―"

"Don't be silly." Loretta Young pulls a miniature bible from her bag. "I was happy as a lark."

"...You were...'happy' about it being stolen?" Flynn chuckles. Although he's wearing a smirk, he's squinting at the lass's indecipherable subtext. "I...I'm afraid I don't exactly follow."

She shoots a smile at the left page of her chapter, and one can almost fall in love with the coyness of it. "I was husbandless for three weeks. Of course I was 'appy."

The groan from Mrs. Hayworth's chair makes both chinwaggers look up. "I'll be back."

"We shall patiently await your return, Mrs. Hayworth."

Mrs. Hayworth taps her folder against her smile before walking behind the Discus Thrower sculpture. Flynn drops his act to pout like a two year old. The ex-flapper eyeballs him. He secretly notices. She recants the look, and all falls silent.

"A penny for your thoughts, madam?" Flynn sifts, drawing his leather briefcase into his lap.

"No payment necessary." Loretta Young peruses the right page of her chapter. "You just reminded me of a man I met eight years ago in Outteridge Bay."

Limbo elbows Flynn in the stomach. With his bobbing foot perched on his knee, he cocks his head into hers and waggles his eyebrows. "A ridiculously _handsome_ man, I'm assuming."

"Probably the most gorgeous scoundrel since Apollo."

"Oh, then I'll take it."

"You should. Every husband in the red-light district wanted his face," she reminisces. "He was an expert at mind games and extravagant promises." Her hand reaches down to stroke her calf. "Seemed to know all the eight wonders of the world and a woman." Whatever has gotten into her departs at the bat of her eyelash, much like this old flame's baby maker. "Of course, I was a newly wed back then, and...I was ready to pay for romance."

A light bulb blinks in Flynn's head. On one end of the gamut, describing the details of this unexpurgated content suits her personality, but on the opposite, he wonders if she is trying to tell him something he does not want to hear. He reviews the nearest exit. "And, what _exactly_ was one of his extravagant promises, if you don't mind my asking?"

His storyteller watches her fingernail rake down the edge of a page. "To swoop in and take me far, far away from my quiet little life."

Flynn winces. "You don't say,"

The ex-flapper bites the bow of her smile. "We made love from Outteridge to Yellowbirk in the most _ungodly_ places." She stretches a curl, sanding it between her fingertips as her eyes visit another world. "A form of love, anyway." Sigh. "Sometimes I forgot what to do with my lungs."

The amphitheater of Flynn's heart is promptly rented out by a drummer band. For starters, she's looking at her bible like she's watching her own body being sawed up and down a squeaky mattress. Secondly, what is he supposed to tell her? That he remembers spreading her ankles from Outteridge to Yellowbirk as their wet skin clapped from dusk till dawn? He's desperately browsing a mental catalog of names to assign to her face, but his memory for names comes second to lady parts.

"I heard he left the state a year and a half ago. His last client couldn't tell me why."

Flynn's hold over _Eugene_ peters away as the torn sod stares straight on...

"...But you still look well, Flynn. As well as you could in your business, anyway."

Eugene gazes at the empty parlor with liquid shining in the pink corners of his eyes. The ex-flapper watches sunlight wobble against his pupils. His hanging bottom lip meets his top one very slowly.

She inches forward, eager to wrap her mind around what she is seeing. "Flynn?"

His eyes slide back to her face. With a jolt, he sits up and shakes his head, looking at her sorrily. "U-Um..." The chap clears his throat to shore up his tottery voice with faux confidence. "It's, um...it's...it's _Éloïse_ , right? Éloïse d'Orléans. "

She stares at his smile before moving her eyes up to his own. "Second wife of Jean le seconde d'Orléans..."

".. _._ Yeah, I...I _definitely_ remember you now," he says, barely pieced back together. "You, uh...look a little _different_ from the last night we met in Orléans, however..."

Éloïse d'Orléans does a fair imitation of smirking. "I _was_ upside down for most of it, Monsieur Rider."

"..."

"..."

"...That _might've_ been it!" he squeaks like a strangled hamster.

"I'm just pulling your stocking." Éloïse turns a page, smiling. "I look different because American surgeons do wonders."

"The wonders never end," he dumbly replies, having had his frontal lobe go quite limp from the car accident that was this encounter.

Silence grinds on by with a suspicious cliffhanger.

"...My husband will be leaving the country tonight." Duchess Éloïse doesn't look at him. "I haven't been in Goldwater for six years, and...I'd like to see the sights one last time."

It is quiet again, as he tries to regroup his brain cells, but then he sees her uncross her legs. Éloïse advertises just enough shin for him to behold the pearl lace g-string that is gating her palace.

He feels that gas bubble of self-destruction expanding in his chest like a quasar. _'Doooon't you dare.'_

Éloïse rubs her decolletage as he brushes the side of her knee with the side of his thumb. He can hear her shuddery breath. His pants tighten. Her palm stumbles over his knuckles and squeezes, burying his warm palm between her legs.

Electricity arcs up his wrist. _'H-Holy...'_

Her grotto is sticker than a jar of heated honey―

―"You **IMBECILE**!"

He rips his hand out of Éloïse's honey hole and pins his wrists between his knees, staring widely at the antechamber.

"Did you call me just to tell me that?! I'll have you know that Weselton's Auction House is the most prestigious auction house you will ever find in all of Goldwater! No other director will stick his neck out for you the way I have, but _this_ is the way you repay me?!"

Interns and temps pour into the parlor to blink at the door down the hall.

―"How _dare_ you question my motives! I will terminate the entire operation and have my men remove all the inferior tchotchkes in your farmhouse of a villa! Good DAY!"

The interns break apart like clouds after the phone hits its hook with a loud echo.

"...Mr. Rider?"

He yanks his head up with his lips pulled over his teeth.

Mrs. Hayworth is beaming at him like her face was molded that way. "Mr. Weselton will see you now."

...And so he grins as convincingly as he can. "...Stuuupendous!"

* * *

"Mr. Weselton."

"Yes, _yes_? What is it _now_?"

"Mrs. Hayworth said Lars Westergaard has been calling you for over an hour."

" _Oh_ , for Pete's sake! ...Well, don't just _stand_ there. What did the mongrel _say_?"

"He said he's reserving a table for you at Dauphine of France."

"...Dauphine of France, eh?"

"Yes, sir. The restaurant on Royal Drive.'"

"Hmmm~..."

"Sir?"

"Tell him I was hit by a _train_."

"...But, _sir_! He's your niece's husband―"

"Ohh, don't 'sir' _me,_ Mrs. Witherspoon. That misbegotten rascal is no crony of mine! Do you _know_ what kind of company he keeps? Liberals and rakes, that's whom! Now off with you―"

"But Mr. Weselton―"

"Off _with_ you _,_ I say! I have more important matters to deal with, and they do not involve my sniveling, money-laundering _relatives_."

"...Yes, Mr. Weselton."

"And one―more― _thing_ , Mrs. Witherspoon."

"... _Yes_ , Mr. Weselton?"

"...Has Mr. Rider finally decided to show his pritty face?" The transition from impatience to pleasure is a shuddersome thing to listen to even from the corridor.

"Apologies, Mr. Weselton, but haven't a clue of what he looks like in order to make such a connection."

"Should you catch sight of a fellow who looks as though he's been suctioning lemons for breakfast ― evidently flirting with every female at that precise moment ― then _that_ , Mrs. Witherspoon, would be Mr. Rider."

The bearded listener in the hallway fantasizes about bopping Weselton on the toupee.

"...I'll keep the image in mind, Mr. Weselton."

"Off you go, then. G'on."

Upon the turning of the knob, the office is reopened for visiting hours. Its leaver, who is as chunky as she is pretty, trots out and cuts into the hallway's traffic.

Flynn finds himself falling out of step with Mrs. Hayworth after the crying redhead hurtles past them with the velocity of a Mercedes-Benz. "Um ― Mrs. Hayworth?"

Mrs. Hayworth pauses in the office's doorway. She smiles and walks back to him. "Yes, Mr. Rider?"

Flynn sucks on his top lip for a twinkling before glancing over his shoulder to see Éloïse thumbing through that prop she calls her bible. While her fingers are tugging on her necklace, the little heathen calls herself looking up to grope him with her eyes.

 _"How terribly rude would it be not to return the sentiment?"_ His alter ego's voice snakes around his willpower and squeezes mercilessly.

Eloïse parts her legs for him again. This time, he can see everything, and everything is all that it takes to send him reeling. Mrs. Hayworth blocks him from the tantalizing mound of mutton with her tantalizing jello molds. Astounded by how much God hates vegetarians, Flynn's bad aim climbs up her throat to rest on her blue eyes instead of her rack.

"Would you care for something, Mr. Rider?" Mrs. Hayworth blinks. Somehow, that small scene is as lovely as watching butterflies migrate.

"Well, um..." Flynn rubs his jaw, giving Mrs. Hayworth his shoulder for a moment, and then turns around to squint at her face. " _Maybe_ I should...come _back_ at another time." He pockets his hand and shrugs one shoulder, using his head to gesture to the office door without parting from her gorgeous eyes. "Y'know, when Weselton _isn't_ ovulating."

Mrs. Hayworth's amusement fades with her butterscotch color.

Flynn closes his eyes. "... _He's_ right behind me, isn't he?"

She nods, biting her nail.

" _There_ you are, you confounded ol' tramp!"

Flynn's shoulders jump up to his ears. He rotates on a slow axis until he's face to face with the balding weasel. Theatrics replace terror: "...Ahhh, _just_ the hobbit I wanted to see! I was just ― and I mean JUST ― on my way to your little Shire." He crounches down with a hand on his hip to point at Weselton's throat. "Is that a new polka dot bow tie assembled with a Norfolk Jacket from the Mehringer collection that I see? Well, aren't _you_ looking dapper for a special occasion―"

"Enough of your buffoonery!" Weselton uses his toes to increase his height. "Where **were** you at eight o'clock this morning? Hm? HM?" The weasel narrows one eye and peers at him with the other like a cartoon caterpillar peeking through an apple hole. "You think I have time to throw my door open for any riff-raff who waltzes in whenever he feels like it? Why, it's a mark of absolute impudence ― a repulsive example of disgraceful manners!"

Sighing rather dramatically, Flynn sits his palm on his chest to animate his shame. " _You're_ right, Weselton. I―am― _utterly_ at fault for―"

"Oh, shut it, you...you... _mongrel_! I don't want to hear another peep out of you!"

"...Now, I wouldn't say I _peep_ ―"

"NOT another peep, I say! Simply strap on a muzzle and get _in_ here!" Weselton marches back into his office and holds the door open for him.

Flynn timidly implores Mrs. Hayworth to rescue him with his puppy eyes. She only gives him a sympathetic wave in return. He sighs.

" _Rider._ "

"Alright, al-RIGHT, I'm _coming_ ,. Just keep your _veins_ in." Flynn moseys into the room with his briefcase sweeping against the side of his calf. "Remember what Dr. Johnson said about meno―...pause...?" His feet slow down to let his peepers marvel at the kingdom before him.

The new Wellington executive desk, Chippendale cabinets, Victorian chandelier, and Louis XIV fauteuils in Weselton's den make the foxhole look like the President's Oval Office enmeshed with Queen Elizabeth's art gallery. For all its glamour, the two pug-faced gentlemen posted behind that new Wellington executive desk suck all the beauty out of it.

 _'Yeesh! Now that's ugly decor. Wasn't there any other garniture in stock?'_

"My traveling swindler." Weselton throws himself down into his Tudor throne chair like a displeased king. "You're either very brave or very stupid to show your face in these parts."

"Well...given that _you_ returned my calls, I don't feel unwelcome." Flynn looks around the room before smirking back at him with one eyebrow standing up. "Besides, I was starting ta' get a little _lonely_ out there in the New World, so I thought I'd swing by like old times."

"Rubbish. Where've ―...hold that thought. What're you _wearing_?" Weselton adjusts his specs to see better.

Flynn looks down at his suit. "Oh!" He thrusts his hand into his pocket and raises his toes off the ground. "Y'mean this ol' thing?" The bounder opens his coat and twirls on the ball of his foot in slow motion. "You like? Turned out that the wardrobe of one damsel's father had suits in my size." Flynn holds the lapels and puffs out his chest arrogantly. He neglects mentioning that he stole the suit off a rack in Lumfjord, not from a closet offered by its owner's smitten seed.

"Despicable," Weselton slams. "Is that where you've _been_ for over a year? Hiding out with deflowered enablers?"

"Well, let's just say that I was on _vacation_. Nothing too scandalous to write home about." Flynn fools with the head busts of Weselton's ancestors. The meerkat's DNA zigzags all the way back to the House of Tudor, but his own stardom in the pleiad of nobles is limited to being seen as "the descendant of such and such," which is a decent status in itself, given the man's access to the most powerful people in the world and the most valuable items in theirs. His stupidity lies in hoarding stolen treasure because of his objectophila.

"Keep your filthy phalanges to yourself!" Weselton caws. "I've no idea what pipe they've been plumbing!"

Flynn deadpans. He puts his hands where Weselton can see them. "Happy now, Your Royal Prudeship?

"Oh, hush up." Weselton points to the bergère in front of him. "Just sit down already, why don't you? I don't have all day."

"Fine by me." He saunters up to the offer. "So, who're the, uh...Buckingham Palace Guards over here?" His head nudges in the direction of the short man and his tall equal standing on opposite ends of Weselton's elbows.

"Their names are Erik and Francis."

" _Voof._ My apologies, gentlemen."

The two eye each other before glaring back at Flynn.

"Let me guess...you rented them from Murder INC, the Mafia's murder-for-hire gang?" Flynn holds the stomach of his suit and reaches over the desk to shake their hands. "The Flynn Rider."

They continue to scowl at him.

"...Oooh― _kay_." Flynn folds his fingers back into his palm. " _Pleasure's_ all mine, then."

"Sit." Weselton opens a folder.

Flynn stands his briefcase up on the floor. After flicking the tails of his coat, he sinks his butt into his armchair. "Nice action figures you got there―"

"My nephew-in-law is looking for you, you know."

Flynn tries to look smug on the outside because his inner sissy is screaming on the inside. "Weselton, you have _thirteen_ nephew-in-laws, so you'll have to be a _little_ more specific than that."

Weselton looks satisfied with what he is about to railroad him with: "Hans. Ring a gong?"

A chill tickles his vertebrae. "...Oooover a _dozen_."

"I told him this morning that you called for an eight o'clock appointment. He said he wanted to see you. Waited around here till ten."

"Huh...WELP!" Flynn grabs a cigars from the desk's tray. "Too bad I missed 'im!"

Weselton examines him before frowning. "...Are you _eating_?"

"Cuse me?"

"It just dawned on me that you look like something my Persian coughed up."

Flynn supplies a dry look. "...'Preciate it, Weaselton. I adore you almost _half_ as much."

―"Mr. Weselton!" Five knocks hammer against the door.

Weselton squawks, "What?! Can't you see that I'm―"

"Her Highness of Sverre and Schleswig-Holstein is on the phone."

Flynn plugs the cigar into his mouth and takes a lighter out of his breast pocket.

"Princess Elsa, sir."

Weselton lends an ear to the door. "... _Elsa_ , you say?"

"...As in the daughter of Norway's abdicated king―"

"I know who _Elsa_ is, you fool! What does she **want**?"

"A preliminary assessment for her mother's parure. She's pleading."

"Tell her to sink to the bottom of the ocean."

Flynn clicks his tongue. "Now, _Weaselton_..." He blows a smoke ring into Weselton's face, neatly fitting it over his head like a turtleneck. "Is _that_ any way to treat a woman in need?" He bobs an eyebrow at him.

Weselton spanks Rider's foot with his folder after seeing his leather loafers on the desk. " _You_ shut it! Don't go making those _perverted_ eyes at me!"

"Hans Westergaard will have a word with you and me if I tell her that, Mr. Weselton," the secretary moos.

"I could care less. And stick your surgically altered nose somewhere else! You're not being paid for family counseling. If that woman hasn't made an effort to introduce herself to his in-laws, then she's not worth a contract. I won't deal with _exiles_."

"As you wish, sir."

Once Weselton is certain that she was gone, he snaps his fingers at Erik and Francis. "You two! Guard the door to make sure no one eavesdrops."

They walk around the desk and close the door after themselves.

"The daughter of a king, huh...? Well, I'll _be_..." Flynn crosses his ankles on the table again. "Is this crown jewel within a two mile radius by any chance?"

"Have you no home training?! ...And what's it to _you_ , anyway?"

"Nothing. Just sounds"― _'orgasmic'_ ―"sensational." He wags his foot as he squints at the portrait of Queen Victoria behind Weselton, clamping his teeth back down onto his cigar. "A real life _princess_...I wonder how dry she is from her _lack of autonomy_..."

"You're vile."

Flynn points his cigar at Weselton. "I _knew_ that would tickle your armpits."

Weselton blushes. "D'oh, stoppit! Let's just jump straight to business so that we can get this over with. What ever happened to the Pless Tiara you promised me, _hm_? The one from Izabel Zofia's jewel vault?"

Flynn's arrogance disintegrates like sand being washed away by seawater. The cigar spins between his fingers at the speed of helicopter blades.

The sunlight blinks off Weselton's glasses with a glint, making them resemble headlights. "She didn't finance your services long enough to take you abroad for more oral therapy?" He reaches into his drawers. "Or did something else **happen**? Something such as **this**?" He slaps a newspaper down.

Flynn shuts his eyes.

"Read it."

His nostrils throb.

" **Read it** , I say."

He lets his fingers fall open. Lets his shoulders sink. Lets himself swallow the shrapnel in his esophagus. Opening his eyes feels like tearing wet Kleenex apart as he guides them to the newspaper.

* * *

 **¯¯̿̿¯̿̿'̿̿̿̿̿̿̿'̿̿'̿̿̿̿̿'̿̿̿)͇̿̿)̿̿̿̿ '̿̿̿̿̿̿\̵͇̿̿\**

 **STABBINGTON BROTHERS**

 **MURDER KIDNAPEE**

 **IN POSSESSION OF POLISH TIARA**

* * *

Four pictures grin under the column's paragraphs. Two feature the Irish-American gangsters in the headline, whom are flanked by a snapshot of the pearled tiara and their honey-haired victim. Her young eyes, deceptively innocent as they are, melt into Rider's.

"Did you read it?"

He lets his crimson eyes roll back into the head he lowers in order to squeeze the roof of his nose.

"Did you look at what it says?"

The sound of veins thumping in his brain drowns out Weselton's question.

"It says that paper was written a year ago."

The heel of his foot won't stop pedaling off the ground, but Weselton ignores his body language.

"You let these bank robbers get away with what you were supposed to bring to _me_ so that I could bring it to those _Germans_ , and didn't even bother to communicate with me **after the fact**. What on Earth was this teenager doing with my riches? The nerve of you to even drop off the face of the planet for over a year and―...are you even _listening_?" Weselton's entitlement complex sits unscathed. "Why the Devil won't you answer me when I'm speaking to you―"

The bearded man pounds his fist on the desk, forcing Weselton's antique accessories to jitterbug. "Because that newspaper went _global_ , so you already read what _happened!_ The entire world read what _happened_!"His voice is broken into shards of a detonated grenade.

Weselton shrinks into a milksop at the sight of the rogue's saber-toothed snarl. He can barely make out the eyes that are blazing underneath those hateful-looking eyebrows.

"Mr. Weselton?!" Three knocks hammer against the door. "Is everything alright, Mr. Weselton?!"

"A-Ah..." Weselton, who's still curled up in his chair, tics his head towards the source of the shout without breaking eye contact with his intimidator. "...Y...yes, Francis! Everything is...perfectly _fine_. We're just...h-having a heart to heart of sorts..."

The twitches rimming his intimidator's glare remain, as if every word he hears is a guerrilla attack against his tear ducts. He bends over the desk, exhaling tearfully. _Flynn_ tells Eugene that he needs to ankle the scene before he has a panic attack ― _"You're too soft for this. I keep telling you you don't know how to survive this. Let me handle it."_

Weselton puffs, "What did you come for if it wasn't to explain this matter, Flynn Rider?"

It takes time for the hyperventilating man to come down from his palpitations. He manages to have a seat after licking the trail of sweat salting his lip, just about stumbling over his ankles in between his weak efforts to pull his body towards the chair. Sitting helps. Sitting makes the room stop spinning. What sitting doesn't do is stop the pain.

"Rider," Weselton pushes.

He reacquaints his unblinking eyes with the old buzzard's.

Weselton repeats his earlier query, " _What_ did you _come_ for if it wasn't to explain this matter?"

A shade of darkness crawls over his face and breaks the trance. "...To give you a stand-in," Flynn replies, hoarse and inert. It's as though there was a sudden death of his human soul.

"A _stand_ -in?" Weselton parrots.

Prior to wiping his nose and sniffing, the annoyed Flynn pushes the briefcase against the crackling newspaper. "Close your drapes first."

Weselton delays the action. "I beg your pardon?"

The varlet falls back into the chair with his legs open, fingers twining across his stomach. "Just do what I _tell_ you to do."

Weselton hides his gulp by trying to make his face as mean as he can make it. "... _Hmph!_ " He debarks to untie the drapes. "Insolent muppet, trying to tell _me_ what to do on my own turf...Who does he think he is?" Grumbling rubbish about Flynn's appalling manners was his way of minimizing his own spinelessness. He sits down after the absurd task has been completed. "Now what's this all about? ...Is this a _bomb_?"

"Open it."

Weselton's mustache swishes from side to side.

Flynn's knee sways back and forth. "Go on. _Open_ it."

Weselton cracks his knuckles and wiggles his fingers. He pulls the lid back. " _Ho._.." A tiara of light sheets his face and halos his pupils. He presses his handkerchief against his breast. "Are these...what I...think they are?"

"The four missing sapphires to Queen Marie-Amélie's pearl tiara, complete with five sparklers at your disposal."

Weselton erupts with joy. "...EX-cellent, this is EXCELLENT. This is MARVELOUS. I can finally restore the queen's crown for that uppity German! This is―..." He shuts the briefcase. "...How did you _get these_? Did you travel all the way to France? ...Did you bed Jean's wife in his own home _again_?"

"They were smuggled into Goldwater by the duke himself last week. Either he thinks Germans will be coming for "loot" in France or he intended on pawning them off in secret on his own. Whichever way it goes, they're yours now, so fondle them as you please."

Weselton lunges for the briefcase.

Flynn slides it back. "... _After_ , you give me what you owe me, of course." Even though Rider is smirking, his stare is stone cold.

To Weselton, his antagonist is not the same unlicked cub who fled Goldwater. Although that whelp, with his life of compulsive sex and robbery, was as insensitive as he was decadent, this callous incubus is an even darker devil.

" _Your_ share?!" Weselton roars. "I didn't hire you for this commission! You took it upon yourself to bring me a gift on your own accord!" He dives for it again.

Rider holds the briefcase out of Weselton's reach by the tips of his fingers. "It was an _open_ commission. I didn't get you the complete set seven years ago, so you agreed to pay me a full portion once that happened. I already got you the _first_ sapphire parure, didn't I?"

"...I did say that terrible thing, didn't I?"

"You most certainly _did_. This is my last time doing any heists or smuggles for anyone, so I'm trying to make this quick and painless. The whole point of our little transaction today is so you don't have to worry about stalking me for another year."

"Returning to your sporting district fan club, are you? Or do they still call it the red-light district?"

"What're you, senile? The Roaring 20's are over."

"But what would Goldwater's tourism business do without its main attraction?"

"It'll live."

"And where will you?"

"That's my prerogative."

"Fine, I don't care to know. I just think it's a shame you never got me one of Norway's gems before you decided all this."

"I've had no luck whatsoever with any Norwegian Crown Jewels because they most likely don't exist."

"There hasn't been a coronation since 1905, so perhaps not, but I would've loved to have had the alexandrite gem."

"A self-proclaimed duke who kings over thugs and war criminals can't have his cake and eat it, too. Put your binoculars on this "Elsa's" window and have a ball. Hell, play with both for once in your life."

"Why you _ingrate_ ―"

" _Focus_ , Weaselton. Wasn't Her Royal Highness the Crown Princess of Norway?"

"Hardly! She was born after her father's abdication. I know he had a large collection of European jewels, but I doubt she's hoarding them with her situation."

"Shame."

"...Well, then I will say that you've been a good student and an even better collector up until this point. You've smuggled a number of diamonds and artifacts into my kangaroo pouch, and we've benefited from them mutually for nine years."

"... _Oh_ -kay." Flynn closes his eyes and shakes his head. "What's the _'but'_ here...?"

" _But,_ unfortunately...I can't give you the amount we agreed upon."

That terrifically short sentence is enough to suck him back into the quasar he has been trying to escape since he first set foot in the parlor. " _What_...?"

"Seven years later, I don't have the means. You think I saved the remaining portion after your disappearing act? I thought the Stabbingtons killed you."

The tendons in Flynn's fist stand out under the skin like tree roots. "...So that's it?"

"I can give you something for a year's time. Something to..."―Weselton takes the worn material peeling off Rider's oxfords into consideration―"keep you off _the streets_ for a little while...but I can't give you a lifetime's support. I have my own table to put food on."

Flynn situates his elbows on his knees and stares moistly at his feet. For a second, Weselton looks at him like he pities him.

"Well..." Flynn's eyelids close as he heaves himself up and swings the briefcase off the table. He opens his eyes, standing over Weselton with a smirk that sheathes his rage. "...It was _lovely_ doing business with you, Weaselton."

"...Wait, _what_? ...Wh...Wh-Where're you going? Just what do you think you're _doing_?!" Weselton jumps onto his feet.

"Delivering it to Hoffmann _exclusively_."

"Oh, no you don't! You're not taking that with you―!"

Weselton's ex-traveling swindler salutes him with a flinty smile, bumps his back against the door, and pushes it open. He rebounds when Erik and Francis bar the exit. Now Rider glances about in a torrent of terror. He looks back into the faces of his captors and gulps.

"There are a number of things that you could walk away without, most of all your freedom," Weselton hisses behind him.

Flynn turns around and sneers at Weselton. "... _What_?"

"I'll turn you into the police. Tell them all about your illegal activities," he brags, hoping to steamroller Rider into submission.

...Flynn turns to bolt. He runs straight into the arms of Erik, who, for his part, shackles his down by holding him against his torso. " ― Guys, _guys_! This really isn't ― _nrgh_ ―"

―"Mr. Weselton?" a vibrant voice calls from the hallway.

"Bring him!" Weselton orders. "Bring him in!"

Hands wrestles the conman back into the office as two more tear the briefcase away from him. Before he can shout to the top of his lungs, something happens to his stomach. Drool hits the carpet in _pit-pats_. Erik releases him. Flynn takes one trembling step and then...

 _―THUMP_ ―

"You despicable mongrel."

Rider's body twitches on the rug like a smashed water bug. He doesn't have any air left in him to sob or beg.

"You're not going to leave me with much of a choice, are you?" Weselton sounds like he's talking behind a glass wall. "Take him out back with the rest of the garbage."

He is almost certain that what he sees beside him are his fallen spectacles being picked up by Erik, but his consciousness is beginning to fade before he can make out the shapes. Hands once again drag his limp body off the ground and onto his feet, forcing him to walk.

―"I'm coming _in_ , Mr. Weselton~!"

The door whooshes open.

* * *

 *** Author Note**

* * *

The explicit MA version of this circus is on Archive of Our Own under Otherwise_Uncolonized.


	2. ༺(Just a Gigolo)༻

_"It was part of his very being that he must break off any connection, and be loose; isolated; withdrawn; an absolutely lone falcon again. But the occasional hands that asked him to fly back to them were, as a comfort arid soothing, also a good thing, and he was not ungrateful."_ **― D. H. Lawrence**

* * *

"One hour is up, so I'll huff and I'll puff, and I'll―..." Éloïse explodes into the office with a palm on her hat and a smile on her mouth. Both shrink from their locations as she sops up the scene that is taking place in her company.

Weselton, blessed be his bladder, is standing plank-stiff with his fingers stapled under his teeth, and Flynn, blessed be his soul, is hunched over his knees in a bergère with two scoundrels behind him.

Éloïse presses tentatively on the diamond clamp of her clutch bag with two little onyx hands. "I suppose I've crashed something quite awful..."

"D-D-Duchess Éloïse!" Weselton flaps his arms, announcing her as if the obvious must be announced. He scrabbles around to collect his wits, gone to Neverland as they may be. "Er ― n-no, madam! Nothing awful here at all! Just an unfortunate series of events!"

"What kind?" Éloïse edges into the room like a crab walking sideways in her aim to rubberneck Flynn's constitution.

Weselton impedes her rubbernecking. "An indigestion! The poor chap was struck down by a bad case of food poisoning. Abdominal cramps, chills, nausea ― just about everything under the sun!" He fixes his bow tie as he looks back at Flynn. "Been trying to get him to the door, but he won't budge. Can you _stand_ , my dear fellow? Are you still having spasms?"

"Then call some kind of _doctor_ , Weselton." Éloïse scoots Weselton out of her way with her purse to helicopter Flynn. "Mr. Rider? Mr. Rider..." She yoo-hoos, wasting an admirable amount of energy to grab a glimpse of his face. "I'd like to test your vision with my fingers, Mr. Rider. Can you raise your head for me?"

"Is _she_ some kind of doctor?" Weselton yammers to Erik and Francis.

Flynn coughs into his lap. Duchess Éloïse seats her hand on his shoulder. When he looks up, his eyes are blinded by tears, and a little something more frightful. A salt river tumbles down his cheek before leaking off his goatee.

Éloïse's hand jumps back. She glares askance at Weselton, unshy about her bitterness, and then goes on to address Flynn, "Can you stand, Monsieur Rider? Is the pain too much to bear?"

"You know each other, Your Grace?" Weselton baas, feigning ignorance.

"Of course I know him," she neighs, carpeting him. "You're the one who introduced us eight years ago, or have you forgotten?"

He resiles from his interrogation. "A-Ah! Quite right! Quite right! Ehm ― I shall ― em ― have 'im escorted to a, ah―"

"I'm fib'ine," Flynn gushes, loath to turn his cracked face to the duchess's concerned one.

"Are you?" Éloïse touches the hand that he has curled around his stomach.

He lowers her fingers. "Bur'fectly." The response is blubbery and breathless because his intestines are tangled into a knot of spaghetti.

"But you don't even look like you can _stand_ , Monsieur―"

"I can w-walk..." Flynn stands up, but his coggly legs jackknife. " _Nrgh_ ―"

―Éloïse and Weselton lend their assistance.

Flynn smacks Weselton's hand away. "I _said_...that I was _fine_." His head nods to each emphasis in the sentence. "I'm not a _charity_ case." He doesn't look Weselton in the mug because he's due for another denotation.

"Fine, then!" Weselton yanks on the ends of his jacket to straighten himself up. "You're not my trouble!"

Something shiny, rattly, golden, and astonishingly attractive rolls onto Weselton's table, hooking in the old man by the sweet tooth.

"It's a Régalien pen from Paree," Éloïse explains, dusting Flynn's hat. "Eighteen carat white gold. I had it made for your birthday five months ago."

"Dur'oh! How... _kind_ of you, madam." Weselton almost browns his adult diapers. "I shall cherish it always, but...for _now_ let's, get Mr. Rider out of your hair and into the back of a cab―"

" _I'll_ see him out, Weselton." Duchess Éloïse holds Flynn's elbow pit with her hand, demonstrating that she is his yeoman guard and there will be no argument over it. "I only barged in to surprise you with that gizmo in order to cure my own boredom. Now that such has been accomplished, I'd have a better chance at getting into heaven if I was a good Samaritan to a mutual party in distress―"

"Éloïse," Flynn chops her peroration at the kneecaps.

She reexamines him. "Are you nauseated, Mr. Rider?"

His tongue trips over his teeth. "What? ... _No_ , I...I'm not _nauseated_ , I-I was in the middle of..."―Flynn's speech organ commits its own little suicide after Erik shows him the gun sleeping in his draws. His petrified eyes shake on the silver piece before zipping back to Éloïse―"... _vertigo_."

The duchess rubs his sleeve with a pout. "Poor monsieur." Her head ducks between her shoulders as she jiggles his arm and grins at him, squinting. "We'll take it _one_ step at a time," Éloïse encourages, quite like a salsa instructor who is always supportive of her worst students. "You'll be used to your feet after the tenth. Weselton? _Bonne journée_?"

Weselton's forehead shimmers with perspiration. "Erm... _Bonne journée_."

Duchess Éloïse beams. Having to watch a sultana of her rank sashay away with a guttersnipe of Flynn's would've been close to comical to Weselton if the circumstances weren't so contemptible.

"Erm, Madame Éloïse!" Weselton's call funnels through the tunnel created by his palms. "Be sure to tell your husband that I hope he's... _fairing_ against the Führer's evils―"

"He fairs with his woodpecker, Monsieur Weselton," she cheerfully guarantees. "I'm sure that's how all men of your generation weather politics and foreign threats when the going gets tough. _Bonne journée_!"

The door whines until it glides shut.

"...There are laws against women like that," Weselton mentions in a feeble voice. "...However...if Mr. Rider opens his great gab..."―his countenance darkens with the shadows of a storm cloud―"see to it that you put an _end_ to him."

The thugs share glances and upheave one eyebrow each.

* * *

"It's just around the fountain, Mr. Rider."

With their arms hasped together like two worm hooks, Eugene and his noble savioress march down a footpath that is covered in gravel. Hearing two pairs of feet crunch on pebbles muffles his troubles for a spell, but the chariot they approach blanks his mind for an eternity.

" _Magnifique_ , don't you think?"

"... _Oh_ yeah," Flynn answers in place of Eugene, who had blanched when he first saw the health hazard.

Waiting for them in the parking lot is a red Hispano-Suiza H6B, and it couldn't have glistened any brighter. Its convertible top and partitioned back seats were _precisely_ what the doctor had ordered according to Flynn's prescription note. Loot like this didn't come bumper to bumper with the Bugatti Royale, but the long-nosed seven-bearer is surely the next best cabriolet for any rogue on the run. The chauffeur who babysits the goddess tips his hat to them before opening the back door. Flynn is too love-stoned to turn down the offer, so when Éloïse pulls him inside, he doesn't object.

His avarice froths as he overdoses on the body design of the upholstery. The elegance injects his nervous system with a shot of morphine by reanimating his childhood dream to ride off into the sunset without looking back at the cruel world abaft. Consequences accrued from chasing such a dream are slow to blot it out. As the plushness of the car's leather cushions loses its magic, the gritty events that have led him to his current predicament shatter Flynn's rapture. Shards of elation fall piece by piece like mirror fragments from a wooden frame until the hollow canvas of Eugene is left behind.

" _Merci_ , Absolon," toots the duchess.

" _De rien, Madame_." The chauffeur closes the door after she lifts her leg.

Thoughts now jetting a mile a minute, the charlatan cradles his head with his hands to bury them underground. It is so easy, so revoltingly easy, to reactivate the mindset that piloted him through his adulthood during the _Roaring 20's_. For twenty-seven years, flashy things havee been the only lovers worth loving because lovers with flesh have always broken his heart; seemingly innocent blondes with halos laurelling their heads were no exceptions. Come what may, the little sun ray that is still flickering in his heart, the little ember of humanity that had been doused by humanity itself, has tried to remind the shadow of _Flynn Rider_ to never forget the tragedies his addictions have caused.

Although reminders stay in his memory like a rusty sword wedged into his lung, no hemorrhage of Eugene's can be survived without allowing Flynn to pretend there is no hemorrhage at all.

"Here."

He looks up, eyes still wringing wet from the day's nose dive.

Éloïse hands him her cigarette holder, which is presented as a slender tube with a cigarette at the stub. This too is a famous fashion statement for flapper girls and sterling prostitutes. Hers, however, is inlaid with amber and emeralds to flaunt her husband's wealth. "Smoke this. It'll help."

Her unmanned damsel in distress, whose face is polished to a sheen by sweat, shakes his head. "Thank you, but..."―he swallows his bile―"no thank you."

"Suit yourself." She pats the shelf of her chest with a handkerchief.

Eugene twists his liquor flask open and chugs its liver-killer like a British soldier in the desert of Sudan. The chugging lasts for five minutes. A beautiful haze emerges from the imbibition as a result, weakening his aura enough to give Flynn the microphone. " _That_ hits the spot..."

Éloïse bounces her cotton ball curls in the mirror of her powder case. "But it won't help much with food poisoning, now will it?"

Flynn's eyes drift back into his skull until the lids fall like curtains. " _Mm_ -mm..." He shakes his head again as he swooshes the liquor around in his mouth for longer marination, gulping afterwards. "It'll help with _all_ of it..."

" _Excusez-moi, Madame?_ " Absolon turns in the front seat to raise his eyebrows at Éloïse. The wrinkles lining his forehead remind Flynn of an unironed shirt. " _Souhaitez-vous prendre à votre villa_?"

"Ahhhmm..." Éloïse scratches under her own eyebrow with a fingernail. She pauses to glance at Flynn. "Where do you live now, Flynn?"

Flynn's body transforms into a log. If only it could transform into a rocket.

"I'm inclined to get you there safely for my good deed to check out."

"Um..." He nervously pats his knees. "You can...drop me off in the bay, if that's alright."

"Outteridge Bay?"

"Affirmative."

"Well, what's your apartment number?"

Flynn blows out a long breath of frustration. His fingers trail down his cheeks before joining at the peak of his goatee. "Okay... _alright_...so, look..." He confronts her. "There _is_ no..."―his voice deepens―" _apartment_ , so to speak..."

Éloïse tries to do the math. "You're homeless...?"

"...Not _exactly_."

"Have you been without an apartment for over a year?"

" _No_ ―...well, not _exactly._ It's... _complicated_."

" _How_ complicated?"

"Incredibly complicated."

"Flynn, I have the rest of the day to either help you or hound you."

"Hound me?"

"With questions."

"...You _do_ realize that I can just open the car door and kind of _walk outside,_ right...?"

"You _do_ realize that I can track you down, right?"

"...Scary enough. Alright, so what did you mean by 'help' on the alternative spectrum of things?"

"Elaborate on this 'complication' and I'll elaborate on the alternative."

"...Fine. Remember when you mentioned my 'last' client?"

"Mrs. Zofia?"

"Bingo. Weselton's friend. I still had access to hers and another widow's account up till...a ceeer'n _point_...and that certain _point_ led to an eviction notice over thirty days ago."

"Oh, _Flynn_...and the court order?"

"I obviously didn't have a fight here, and no one was going to give me the benefit of the doubt. Cut to the present, and the sheriff and the landlord locked poor little me out of my own home last night before the eviction order's expiration date."

"...Of all the conundrums a pretty man like you could get yourself into. And I'm guessing you didn't qualify or didn't _want_ to qualify for Outteridge's assistance programs?"

"Unqualified through and through, mademoiselle. There's no way on this planet or the next that I'll shack up in a homeless shelter as a last resort, either. Do you have any idea what they'd do to a gentle butterfly like me?"

"So then what _are_ this gentle butterfly's plans?"

"He had a plan. It just...didn't _go_ as planned. And now plan B, along with plan C, might've suffered in the domino effect." Flynn looks at his tinted window, muttering anxiously to himself, "...Just have to popcorn a new one."

The knave needs his Sri Lankan sapphires, but he doesn't need his criminal record being put on blast by Weselton if he succeeds in ganking it. He especially doesn't need to be on any German hit lists. A fox hunt orchestrated by Weselton would involve the police, Jean, Éloïse, France, Nazis, and the Mafia.

"Are you staying in a hotel or a rented room?"

"It's~... _complicated_."

"How unique. Then what about your belongings?"

"Storage."

"But most is still locked in the apartment, yes?"

"More or less."

"And are you going to find some way to get your landlord to let you in so that he won't sell them? Because Goldwater permits him to do that before seven days."

"...We _had_ some monetary negotiations arranged for today, yes."

Éloïse scratches her back. "Aie, yai, _yai_...okay, okay, okay...―erm, _Absolon_? _S'il vous plaît nous emmener à la péninsule? Et marcher dessus_!"

" _Oui, Madame_."

The engine rumbles.

Flynn frowns between Éloïse and the driver. "Wwwwhat did you just say to him?"

"I told him to take us to my villa on the peninsula. My husband's checkbook is there."

"...The who, what, where now?"

"Just save me the violins, Flynn." Her head turns toward the window. She lowers her chin to look under the brim of her hat at the capitalists smoking outside. "We'll discuss how much you need when we get there."

He stares at the side of her sunbathed countenance. A most vibrant knockout it is, and a most vibrant knockout it always was. Remembering how strongly he fancied her shimmer in the olden days does him no good in the grand scheme of things. She has easily bought his fable without any need for panhandling, and his shoulder angel wants her to refund it. Eugene resurfaces from the swamps of Flynn's marshland to save her while he still can, "You know you don't... _have_ to do any of this―"

Éloïse reels her head back to bestow him with one of her more impressive smirks. "You would've asked me _sooner_ or later, Monsieur Rider."

His heart thuds. Bleeds. Flynn pushes Eugene's head back under water. " _True_ , true...but not if your husband could blackmail us _both_ ―"

"Don't worry about Jean; we still have a creative arrangement these days."

"...As if that statement wasn't cryptic at all."

The wheels of the chugging Hispano-Suiza roll off the driveway's curb with a crunch.

On the automobile's trek to the stop sign, Flynn thinks he spots red sideburns in a shoal of streetwalkers, but he waves his apprehension away. _'Any barber could give a horrible haircut like that, right?'_ Lying helps. Lying keeps things from spinning out of control. What lying doesn't do is stop the anxiety.

It is only distance that provides respite. The further they get from Weselton's Auction House, the better his colon feels, and soon enough, the tide from the evening settles down. Flynn knows the daylight is going to inflict more sunburns than Weselton's betrayal, but presently, he must concentrate on lobotomizing _Eugene Fitzherbert_. He checks his watch for the hour.

Éloïse smashes up against him. "What time is it?" she whispers.

Flynn blows away the ribbon on her hat to stop it from tickling his nostril. "Well, um ― four-thirty, to be exact," he whispers back.

Éloïse lifts her head to smile at him. "Why are you whispering?"

His eyes dash from side to side before his eyebrows crash together to glare at her. "...Well, _you_ started it."

She playfully bites her mouth. Flynn abstains from biting it, too.

Éloïse scoots away and faces the road like a prim princess whom he wants to undress. Breasts jiggling to and fro with the automobile's movements, she lilts, "So what did you do to blow Weselton's toupee off his noodle?" She flutters the bottom of her skirt to smooth it over her knee. "Whatever it was will probably motivate him to tell his female socialites to steer clear of you, you know."

"I'm sorry, what?" Flynn tilts toward her with his palm under his ear. "Did you say something?"

"Clearly the 'food poisoning' was a lie," Éloïse continues. "So what trouble did you get yourself into?" Her partly-hooded eyes skate up and down his face. She rests her temple against her seat, smiling. "Did you sleep with his ex-wife?" The question is whispered with devastation, but her wagging eyebrows betray her jest.

"...You _know_ what?" Flynn's arm slinks behind her head as he cranes his neck to look about. "I'm just gonna come clean here." He eases his spine against the seat and brings his face back to hers, jabbering, "That is _exactly_ what happened."

Eloise grins.

"The old mongoose had a detective following me _all_ around Outteridge last year unbeknownst to me. I tried to explain that Madeline was the one who came onto me, but he wouldn't―hear―a _word_ of it. So I said, 'perhaps if you had actually taken care of her like a husband is _supposed_ to do, she wouldn't have come looking for _me_ before filing those divorce papers.'"

Éloïse chews on her bottom lip in a manner that suggests she is paying no mind to his explanation, and it is a manner that distracts him. They both sway to the rhythm of the car's rocking. The bottle-blonde's attention falls to his mouth. His roams her face, drinking it in like whiskey. Seconds thick with old feelings close the gap between their noses.

Éloïse's pink muscle brushes his cupid's bow until it finds the gall to sink between his lips and sweep the floor of his mouth. He sighs, either from a sense of release or a need to repress, he doesn't know, but once his body unwinds, it becomes a stranger to his brain. Flynn cocks his head to sip on her tongue. Éloïse's whimpers add to the cocktail. The French kiss, on her end of the hockey court, is shy and shaky, full of gasps and squelches, but it quickly tailspins into deep tongue-sucking at the expense of his comfort zone.

The hand that is on his rib creeps up his chest to caress his nape, and after a sudden jerk, their lips are mashed together even harder.

"Um... _El_..." He chuckles against her mouth in clipped breaths, breaking the thread of saliva between their yoked lips. Flynn's eyes open to hers under heavy lids.

She rubs his panting mouth with her thumbs before kissing away the sweat on his cheek. His hungry Éloïse, as tasty as she is, scares him by filling his ear with her tongue instead of her words. His priorities turn turtle as she thrusts the moist head against his lobe, flicking the flab of flesh like a berry.

Flynn's hands go from holding her waist to holding her elbows. " _El,"_ he husks. It must be said that he doesn't like aggressive women and never has. Stretching Éloïse's holes was so addictive in the past because she was always virginal in bed ― God, how he loved virgins ― but in the back of this car, the Cocker Spaniel has mutated into a werewolf, and now he's afraid for his genitals.

Éloïse's tongue wags against his Adam's apple, dripping with confessions that moan about how much she _misses him_ and _wants him_ and _can't be without him_. He mouths a swearword at how good it actually feels, both her nonsense and her affection. The sound of his zipper going down gets a rise out of him much faster than he's able to hide. She plucks his button free, an action that makes his hips jerk, and then peels back the pages of his fly. Her fingers slither under the waistband of his draws.

"Now hold ― _h-hah_...!"

They both gasp as the fever that was trapped between his thighs envelops her palm. She begins stroking him.

"My― _God_...oh, you gotta...we gotta stop ― I don't think ― your _driver's_ right ― _ah_..." The tent made by her hand hops and stirs, a marvel that hardens him just by watching the performance from above. His immediate response heat ups the friction with excess lube.

"Just a little of you, monsieur..." Éloïse stops milking him to drag her prize out of his flannel shorts.

Flynn glances at her, gulping. Éloïse is too mesmerized by his length to speak, and he's too intoxicated by her lust to think. The duchess swoops down and goes to town.

"Aw _-ho_..." Flynn's heels levitate off the car's floor. He claws the top of his seat and tilts his head back with a hand on her hat, curling his lips under his teeth to kennel his whimpers.

The hand wearing her wedding ring strokes his throat and jaw before gripping the lapel of his suit. Between the repertoire of wet sounds produced by slurping, sucking, and gobbling, their hatted driver nonchalantly watches Éloïse's head bob between Flynn's legs from the rear view mirror.

"Oh God...don't _stop_...whatever you do, don't _stop..._ "

Flynn's plunderer surfaces from his drenched crotch with a breathless laugh, yet he sucks in a stream of oxygen like he's the one who had to come up for air. He feels her wet palm patting his cargo, and it's enough to make him lose his head, if he hasn't already.

Éloïse kisses his pouch. "I want every drop of you, Flynn," she breathes, biting the goosebumps on the skin.

"You can have 'em for free," he blubbers, voice just as tight as his hamstrings.

Her tongue unfurls to measure the length of his arousal until it curls around the tip to pull him into her mouth. Small teeth lightly clamp down.

...His eyelids fly open. He snaps up in a panic, removing her. " _Stopstopstopstop_..."

Éloïse's lips slip off him with a pop. She backs away into the shadows of the car, not wiping the squiggle of white on her chin. "What's wrong?" The darkness makes her topaz eyes look big and afraid. "Did I harm you?"

He's panting harder than he was a second ago. Really hard. Too hard. When he finally sees Éloïse ― really _sees_ her, not through her ― his tension visibly wanes, and bemusement fills in the gaps.

"Flynn?"

...He hangs his head and exhales, palms still on her shoulders.

Éloïse holds his wrists. "Flynn, speak to me." Her fingers peel off the strands that are glued to his nose bridge. "Tell me what's wrong."

He does his best to supply an apology, "I'm sorry, I-I...it's just..." He doesn't want to tell her what it is. "I thought I... _saw..._ someone I-I recognized following us on the road..."

"..." Éloïse raises her chin as if a great mystery has been solved. "You're fibbing..."

" _No_ , I―... _well_..."

"Oh, cafoodle." She scoots to the end of her seat as she tidies herself up, passing him a neckerchief to dry himself with. "It must be something that would offend my character if you have to tell me a fib, so I'll put your mind at ease by assuring you that I'd rather not be told."

The duchess doesn't say anything else as they both tend to their disheveled appearances, but he can see her weighing things up, frowning about this, pouting about that, segregating her feelings from the reality. Flynn saws his hand through his hair and stares outside again. Children in a tour bus wave to the Hispano-Suiza from the top deck. He waves back as their reflections leave the car window. His hand rolls the handle to allow salty wind to blast him in the face.

The automobile wings through the marina, and towards its way glimmers the insomniac coast of Greenstone Peninsula. This oasis of terraced hillsides takes him back to what he actually likes about Goldwater. Compared to Outteridge's beach town, Greenstone Peninsula is a floating piece of Southern Italy, but it still isn't enough to make him forget that this was all just one big Western stagecraft built to lure tourists.

His eyes soften. In them is a galaxy of sadness.

One of these mornings, he'll wake up on a real Italian island where he will be tanned, rested, and most importantly... _ **alone**_.


	3. ༺(Who's Elsa Glücksburg?)༻

_"I have to hurt other people in order to get what I want; I don't have a choice but to."_ **― Khali Raymond**

* * *

By the time the Hispano-Suiza squeals to a halt, Flynn Rider is still far out to the Mediterranean Sea in sleep.

"We're here, Monsieur Rider. Monsieur Rider?"

He dog-paddles toward Goldwater's coast ― swimming and shimmying about under the sable fur jacketing him ― only to settle for tugging the thing over his shoulder and snoring louder in perfect contentment.

Duchess Éloïse d'Orléans nuzzles the silky locks behind his ear. "Home sweet home, monsieur..."

Flynn snorts. He pries his eyes open with a kooky grin. "Hole-muh...?"

She kisses his nape. "Mm-hm."

He snuggles back against the car door with his hands folded under his head, breathing happily, " _That_ sounds nice..."

Éloïse suckles on the crown of his ear. "Mm- _hm_..."

Flynn's toes shrivel up. "Oooooh-who-who- _who..._ fuh-heels nice, _too_..." His body shivers as she pecks his throat. "Keep doing that." He sighs long and hard. "... _I_ could use a little more of that right about now..."

With a moistened finger, Éloïse sponges away the lipstick ring on his neck. "It would be even nicer if you weren't drooling."

Flynn's eyes bulge. Cursing to Mark Twain, he rubs his mouth and looks down at the track of spit glistening between his knuckles.

"Oh, stop your fussing. You still look _pritty,"_ Éloïse ribs, fluttering her camel eyelashes at him.

"Pretty my _patootie_." Flynn takes her powder case out of her lap and pops it open to groom himself in the mirror. "How long was I foaming at the mouth for?"

Éloïse hoists her cigarette holder to the corner of her lips, still smirking. "Nearly half as long as a tranquilized elephant."

"...Oh, well aren't _you_ a real scream?"

Absolon wrenches the back door open, causing a floodgate of sunlight to attack the rods and cones in Flynn's retinas.

"Guh! It _burns_ , it burns, it burns, it burns!" he shrieks, shielding his eyes like a vampire.

"Um..." Absolon scratches his cheek, confused as to what's going on. _"Votre villa, Madame Éloïse."_

" _Merci!_ ― Come on then, Monsieur Rider." The duchess spanks Flynn's knee with her purse before wiggling out of the automobile.

Flynn was too busy trying to regain his eyesight to follow her.

Standing akimbo in the distance like Peter Pan, Éloïse raises her hands to use them as a megaphone. "Get a move on it, Flynn Rider!" she merrily barks.

He searches for his barker with the one good eye he has left. "Wait, what? You want me to actually come _in_?"

Éloïse winks. "If you aren't peanut-buttered to the seat, monsieur."

"...But 'in' as in like... _inside_?"

"Does 'in' have another American definition that I'm unaware of, Monsieur Rider?"

Her buttermilk accent, with its wispy slurs and heavy drags on English vowels, always turned him on in the past whenever she used it against his manhood like this. Today is no different. "...Oh, you _want_ me to straddle you, don't you?"

Éloïse's bitten-down grin is his only answer. She turns away and struts across the driveway's travertine pavers with a marvelous set of swinging hips.

"...And _now_ she's just trying to get pregnant." Flynn returns to attempting to evict the ping-pong players who have decided to shack up in his cranium. " _Why_ do I always get tangled up with these pin-ups...?"

A butler and a maid meet Éloïse on the patio to present what looks like a blue invitation card. The summons is not normal in shape or size, for it is half the height of a cafe menu.

" _Mère Gothel livré en personne, Madame,_ " the butler gibbers.

Éloïse tongues her thumb and opens it. " _C'est pour quoi?_ "

" _Il est une invitation à Arendelle_ _."_

She swings it closed. "... _Arendelle_?"

" _Oui_! _Le casino, j_ _e crois_ _._ _Il est la grande semaine de première_ _._ "

"Is this _Mère_ _Gothel_ inviting me or my husband?"

"I assume both, _Duchesse_."

"I _assume_ that I'd get in the way of him shagging her caged canary, Barnard. That _vieille pute_ delivered this to spite me."

" _Que voulez-vous dire, Madame_?"

Clueless to the persons (and vocabulary) in this trialogue, Flynn muffles a yawn on the sidelines as his palm gropes the backseat for his hat. It would be inaccurate to say that he didn't know French, such as nouns like, _"casino, grand premiere week, invitation, personal delivery,"_ and _"old whore,"_ but the rest were pieces of an insolvable puzzle, so he didn't hang an ear for the conversation. He unloads his body from the automobile like Éloïse asked him to and shuts the door behind him with a _wham_. The sun rays on the car's paint shake from the door being slammed so hard.

" _Oh_ no...no, no, _no_!" Flynn ululates. "Oh, honey..." He gets on his knees to pet and kiss the car's waist. " _I'm_ sorry. You know I didn't mean you any harm"━

 _━SCURRRREEECH━_

His fingers curl into ribbons at the racket.

" _Madame Éloïse est en attente pour vous, Monsieur Rider_ ," Absolon tells him in more gibberish while locking the villa's _scrooping_ gate.

Flynn's eyelid twitches. Flexing what little French he can speak, he indulges Absolon with a meager, " _Merci._ "

"Flynn~!"

"Just a _minute~,_ **darling** _,_ " Flynn tweets back. He sighs before trudging through a village of fabric-sticking weeds. Wretched things, they are. He's one second away from offing their heads. Looking up, he realizes that the villa he's approaching is breathing down on him with a glare, as if it was trying to buffalo him into appreciating the landscaper's poor choices. And like Éloïse's face, "It sure is a wee bit _different_ from what I recall..."

Prince Jean's castellated villa looks smaller than it did eight years ago ― now with fewer Corinthian columns and more Roman masonry ― but the crash pad is still bigger than Flynn's net worth. Perhaps too large for a wife whose husband would abandon her in it on more than one occasion. Though seeing how the rental came with a seascape, any nester should've enjoyed the solitude. He knows he would've been rolling around its silkIsfahan rug like a girl in a patch of daisies if he had been jailed in it.

"A picture might last _longer_ , monsieur," Éloïse whinnies from the exterior stairs, which constitute an intimidating mountain of steps under the palm trees. On account of her jewels flashing from the first landing like airplane lights in the night, the woman's prettiness takes after an emerald crown in the shade.

Flynn galumphs around the pomegranates and jogs up to the beauty queen's dais, besotted with her fineness. "It _would_ , wouldn't n'it?" He presses his boot's sole on the top step to make a picture frame with his hands. "But what would a picture _be_ without its _Mona Lisa_?"

Éloïse closes her jacket over her chest to pretend she's being violated. " _Flatterer._ "

"Unapologetically." Flynn offers his arm. "Shall we, mademoiselle?"

Smitten as a kitten, she obliges him with her arm and chin out. "We _shall._ "

A liveried page scuttles onto the scene, looking between the lovebirds incredulously. "AHEM."

Éloïse looks at him.

"Right this way, Monsieur―...ah..."

Flynn smirks longer at Éloïse before directing his cocky look to the page. _"Rider_ should roll off the tongue just fine."

Éloïse hides her smile behind his shoulder.

"...Monsieur _Rider_ , then."

The star-crossed couple climbs the stone stairs behind the old man's heels. The noises ricocheting off their soles make their footsteps sound as if they were walking through soot.

"Think your husband will be back in an hour or no?" Because Flynn knows what the matter is between the duchess and the duke, there is zero concern in his tone as he asks this, but no old flame would find it very amusing to run into his doter's husband even if the rules in their marriage were relaxed.

"Not to worry, Flynn." Éloïse holds onto the crown of her cloche hat during their hike. "Frankly, he won't be returning at all."

Flynn frowns at her before looking onward with a shake of the head, wiggling his eyebrows. "Hafta say I'm becoming _increasingly_ interested in those "creative arrangements" you mentioned ten miles back."

"They're sudless. The public knows we have an open marriage, no matter how one-sided it often was on my part. Ignoring one another's avocations is how we keep the peace, much like the way France and Germany pretend to keep theirs. He's very happy about _comfort men_ taking care of me so that he doesn't have to ― even if it requires his wallet."

"...He must play the neglectful husband role _effortlessly_ , then." Flynn waits for her to make a _ha-ha_ moment out of it, but she sparsely cracks a grin. He would've whispered, _"Old buffoon doesn't know what he's missing out on,"_ against her nape if he hadn't already growled those words between her biscuits when he first sucked her oyster. His recollection of her premier cameo in his life is fresher than the pistol wound on his stomach. Dour Duchess Éloïse, standing in her chic gown, dry panties, and chronic ennui on an active corner of the red-light district.

X-rays of women's dispositions are clearer to Flynn's detector than most men's, and hers had shown a broken heart that night. While he knew he couldn't heal her fracture, he had preyed on her repression as he'd done so many, and out of it budded a peculiar fetish for her kind. He learned through Éloïse that there was no greater love than the love of a trapped princess. Each time suchlike maidens went groping in the dark for an escape hatch, their calloused hands found Flynn Rider's shoulders, the deltoids of a desperado who embodied a man that most married women fantasized about sleeping with. They called him rapaciously horny for life, footloose and versatile, a real do-it-yourselfer, the true, "Hero of Camelot," and oh, how he loved their hails.

Flynn's adventurous leanings would not only steal them away from their locked towers, as Éloïse had emphasized, but take on any storm like an unbeatable hero who could never be clouded by depression. Damsels offered him the very light in their eyes under these porcelain ideals.

 _"But you're a walking liar,"_ Eugene wails from his prison cell.

―"Oh!" Éloïse slaps his forearm at the right time. "Before I let you let _me_ forget..." She sticks the blue card under her armpit and dips into her purse. A familiar pair of glasses are lifted from the bottom.

"Wh... _how_ did―"

"Picked them up before we left." The duchess seats the nose-pads on his greasy nostrils and slides the legs behind his ears. "There! Gewd as new."

The lenses are cloudy, and there is a crack as thin as a spider's leg in one, but they aren't mangled or broken. He scoots them up on his nose with his forefinger, blinking at her like a shy librarian. "Well,isn't this a fluky find?"

"They were in front of Weselton's door. But, I did wonder..." Éloïse cocks her head to pat her chin with the corner of her clutch bag. "Were they just props or do you _really_ wear glasses?" Her half-shut eye is teasingly skeptical.

He chuckles. " _No_ , I, ah... _genuinely_ own reading glasses." Flynn clears his throat. He doesn't know why he's suddenly so bashful. Shyness is a _Eugene_ trait, not a _Flynn_ one. He tramples on the habit like it's a fire that needs to be put out before it can catch on his pants. "...SO ― um ― how about these _steps_ , huh? They make quite the recreational walk!"

"We're almost done."

The moment the page pushes the front door, the smell of beef broth virtually curls under Flynn's nostrils in "S" shapes. His duchess drags his tipsy body past the rustic kitchen and into the Etruscan corridor, where Jean's office sleeps in the dark. An oil lamp is lit by the head butler for their expedition. With his lead, the pair enters the room under the umbrella of golden candlelight. Jean's closed curtains are powdered with dust and the plaster walls are peeling off at the scalps, but the terra-cotta tiles and trompe l'oeil baseboards are mostly spotless.

Éloïse breaks away from Flynn's yoke to set her card on Jean's drop-leaf table.

Flynn lollygags behind her, awed by the acanthus motifs haloing the brass chandelier. He sheds his blazer to free his soggy chest. "Now _this_ is what I call _refinement_..." For a man kow-towing to abstinence, it is incorrigible to be in a chateau like this without wanting to turn it upside down, but if grifting wealthy wives had taught him anything, it was never to steal from the same mark twice (or thrice!) unless you had decoys.

"How much do you need?"

Flynn turns around with his thumbs hooked under his suspenders. Éloïse just so happens to be fishing for her husband's checkbook already, practically vandalizing the dingo's desk in her rampage.

"Um..." Flynn takes a moment to take pity on the pricey accessories she's upsetting. "Say that _one_ more time."

"I said how much do you need? For your landlord's 'negotiations,' for a hotel, for clothing, for food, for the seasons..."

With his thumbs still under his suspenders, Flynn wiggles his fingers before clutching the straps with them. Éloïse is so quick to cosset him that his compunction yells at his alter ego to tell the girl the truth.

"If I can find the _stew'pid_ checkbook to start with..."

"...Don't worry about that right now," he delays. "We'll get around to prices when the book turns up."

" _If_ it turns up." She yanks every drawer open. "Where is this _eluder_?"

" _Easy_. With language like that, you'll scare 'im off before you find 'im."

The gaudy Loretta strips off her gloves and tosses them onto the table with her bracelets. "Is there a reason why your patron dropped you from her account in the first place?"

He watches her emerald bracelets spin on the table like hula-hoops. "It's..."

"Complicated?"

"Exactamundo." Flynn undoes the buttons on his shirt, stopping at the fifth. " _Now_ you're catching on." He reaches for the unopened tobacco box on the drop-leaf table.

The duchess makes a pother, "You'd rather load up on his cigars than accept my cigarettes?"

"Well..." Flynn speaks with a cigar wagging between his teeth as he rolls his sleeves up to his pink elbows, staring at her through devilish eyes. "I just 'appen ta' pur'fer the smell and 'eel of cigars."

" _Ceci est la difficulté...chéquier stupide_..."

"Difficult?" he paraphrases. "What's difficult? What's the matter―"

―"One moment." She opens the office door and hollers, " _Barnard, savez-vous où le chéquier de Jean est_?!"

A shout is returned, _"Je vais regarder, Madame!"_

Flynn unbraids a fraction of that. "You're having trouble _finding_ the checkbook?" he panics.

"Don't do that face. It's here. I just had to ask Barnard if he could nose around the bedroom."

"...I don't exactly like the _sound_ of that, El. _"_

"Always yipping..." Éloïse peels off her hat to shake her hair out like a calendar girl on set. She perches her hands on her hips and looks at him sharply. "It'll be _fine_."

Flynn starts tingling down south. "...' _Fine_ ' definitely describes one thing here perfectly, but it's not the word I'd use for this particular situation."

Éloïse comes out of her bolero jacket. "It's not a situation. Just get comfortable where you are."

Flynn blows a strand off his nostril by mimicking a motor with his lips. "It's your _husband's_ office. There _is_ no getting comfortable." His hands grope his blazer's pockets for his lighter. "Hang on, park that thought..."

Rider circles back to the drop-leaf table to see if the duke has a spare lighter next to the cigar box. His palm grazes the silver lametta that embroiders the card Éloïse had been carrying. Expensively made of shimmer paper and laminated vinyl, the billet's tinsels imitate glittering icicles and snowflakes culled from what had to have been a book of witchcraft.

 _'Who'd blow this much cheddar on an invitation card?'_

Answer: someone with lots of it.

Flynn excitedly flips the card over to see the front. " **ARENDELLE** " is written in big, majuscule letters, and right below them sparkles something as radiant as the Crown of Bavaria _._

"...Sweet baby Jesus on a waffle cone," he groans weakly.

The card's advertisement girl ━ and no doubt shark bait ━ smacks of a more provocative version of 1920's Cinderella in Japanese ink. Her thistly bangs, Bohemian braid, and shimmery dress are neck-and-neck with the cosmic beauty of Queen Guinevere. He peeps the fine print under her elbow:

* * *

 **༺ ( ELSA )༻**

* * *

Flynn stops breathing for five seconds...and then leers five seconds later. " _Well_ , well, _well_...be _still_ my _little_ heart..." His thumb rubs the turquoise rhinestones on her breast. "... _You_ followed me all the way from Weaselton's office, didn't you?" Utterly taken by her, he looks inside to see what Her Sultry Highness is selling him.

One wing is covered in photos of a Château de Versailles-esque casino resort. The other boasts about the entertainment that will be hosted under the proscenium of the betting house. Said section ranges from fine dining to a performance opened by Princess Elsa herself. There is nothing put down to describe what _type_ of performance she will be uncurtaining, but she has a whole stanza dedicated to her "critically acclaimed" footwork in Norway. Evidently, she hadn't gotten that foot in Goldwater's door yet.

At the end of the stanza's shameless abuse of adjectives like, " **hypnotic, graceful** " and " **sensual** " scintillates a real life photograph of her face. He feels himself over-blinking, or maybe not blinking enough, as he thoroughly stares her down. It isn't just for the reason that the face is beautiful, or that the expression she wears is haunting. It is because the photo gives him the grotty feeling that he has seen this face before, on another girl, of a different name...

Rampant visions float under the wobbly jello that is no longer his brain. These doe eyes, with the same gorgeously lush, slightly curling reindeer lashes, are not only hers. They're **_hers._**

"...Éloïse?"

"What is it?"

"...Who's Elsa of Sverre and Schleswig-Holstein?"

"...Sverre and Schleswig-Holstein?" The duchess leans over his arm with her cigarette holder wedged between her fingers. "Mm! Princess _Elsa_ of Sverre and Schleswig-Holstein..." Éloïse exhales an anaconda of smoke against the photograph, clouding Elsa's eyes from him. "Well, isn't this something?" She props her chin on his shoulder and turns her smile towards his jaw, using her fingernail to tuck his glossy fringe behind his ear. Her breath heats his nape as she whispers, "I bring you to my villa and you bring up another _woman.._."

"I just wanna know her situation," he mumbles, caught in a tornado. His mouth is limp ― barely shaping the clay of the words ― and his pupils, overshadowed by the balcony of his eyebrows, are black specks. Flynn has lost his grip on Eugene by letting his happy-go-lucky front give way to an authentic emotion: anxiety.

Noticing the transformation, Éloïse blinks her eyes at the photograph before blinking them at him. She extends her hand over his shoulder and sands one of his strands between her fingers. "You haven't heard anything at all about Elsa since your return?" Her suspicion slithers into his ear canal, " _You_ who'd make it your business to know a face with a pocket like that?"

He shakes his head lamely. He's perspiring so much that drops are starting to collect on the curls of his nostrils.

"State newspapers talked about her."

"...Haven't been in the state long enough..."

Éloïse stoops under his arm to pull it behind her head and perch it on her beanpole shoulders. "There were 'Arendelle' billboards going up of her everywhere in Glover this week." Lipstick-staining kisses weekend down his neck. "I'm sure they'll be going up in Outteridge, too."

He removes his limb by raising it over her head and kicking up the back of her hair. "Haven't been in Glover, either." Ignorant to Éloïse's fuming reaction, he holds Elsa in what little light the office offers, tinkering with his glasses to improve their clarity. "...Un _-canny_...―That _face,_ it's...it's..." He lowers the photo, eyes running over the top of card to stare into the oblivion. "It's uncanny..."

" _What's_ uncanny?"

His body suddenly undergoes a lighter version of _rigor mortis_ as a terribly familiar photo reel screens on his mental projector to reawaken a part of his mind that has been curtained for weeks. Snapshots of a honey-blonde girl whirl by faster than a carousel of horses at a carnival, blinding him with their rotation―

"You find her so spellbinding?"

The curtains drop. He peels off his glasses to throw a frown over his shoulder. " _What_...?"

Éloïse's smile is enigmatic. He sinks the card back down onto the drop-leaf table. Amused by the development of things, she places her palm on Elsa's photograph to excuse her from the conversation, but the princess's eyes still bore bullets into his skull through the spaces between Éloïse's fingers. "It's just that you look at her like you're looking at the ghost of an old lover."

The sentence sits on his lungs with the weight of a walrus. "I-I―..."

Swaying her body a little, Éloïse lets her head fall sideways until her cheek is pressing against her shoulder. "Is that a factual simile?"

Eugene and Flynn duel for the throne of their vessel. The latter gains the upper hand by stepping on the former's toes, but Eugene strikes back with a lunge.

"Hm...?" Éloïse pets the vessel's mouth with the spine of her finger.

The blank-faced veessel robotically folds and unfolds the legs of his glasses.

Tutting, Éloïse drags her nails down Elsa's coy smile as she sidles away. "That chateau you see underwent renovations right after you left, but Goldwater has been on about her for months. Her coming has practically uprooted the German American Bund from New York." She throws the drapes open. Moth wings and dust bunnies snow from the sunlight. "These Nazis are obsessed with albino-looking Norwegians. Elsa is Fritz Kuhn's favorite 'heavenly host,' you know. She may even be Hitler's poster girl."

In the ongoing sword fight between Eugene and Flynn, it is Eugene who one-ups the swashbuckler by elbowing him in the nose. Eugene makes a beeline for the throne and hooks himself up to its neural interface. "Tell me what else you know about her." The order cannons off his tongue and smashes Éloïse's composure to smithereens.

Fear whitens her then ― the fear a woman displays when she has been startled by a mugger in an alley. She attempts to suppress such unease by playing with her fingers, but her giggly deflections are vain: " _Well,_ I...I know that she...she wears too much eye shadow and too little clothing, for starters―"

" _No_ , that's not―...!" Eugene looks away to hold his mouth. He dives back into the conversation with a cracked yell, "That's not what I _meant...!_ "

Éloïse jumps, blinking at him in a way that makes her look close to crying.

The steady thrum of Eugene's finger tapping Elsa's photo saws away at her nerves. "I'm talking about her _backstory_ , her _family,_ her purpose for _being_ here―"

" _Madame Éloïse_?" Three knocks hammer against the door. " _Tout va bien, Madame Éloïse_?"

"A-Ah..." Éloïse tics her head towards the source of the shout without breaking eye contact with Eugene. " _Oui, Barnard! Je vais bien. Nous allons bien. Je vous remercie._ "

".. _Si tu le dis, Madame._ "

Éloïse waits until the butler leaves to breathe.

Eugene's face defrosts. The front of his shirt has a bib of sweat on it. His red eyes have not blinked since his first roar, and the side effect manifests in the tears that are sheening them. He sighs, upset at himself for making her upset. "I'm...look, I'm _sorry_ , I...I didn't mean to fly off the handle like that. It's just that this _girl_ might be someone _very_ important."

Her expression silently screams betrayal. She cuts her eyes down, setting her jaw, and then pulls them back up to his face. Their bulbs are wetter than they were before. "...How much?"

"What?" he breathes.

"How much do you want to be told?"

At the opening of those sluicegates, Eugene splutters, "I want a biography. A whole profile. Gimme anything y'got."

Éloïse's sigh is barely audible. "...If it's so _significant_ to you..."―she folds her arms―"then you need to be very in touch with Norwegian history."

Eugene disembarks on a canapé, running his hands over his wrists. "I've tailgated it. They ― they just got out of a union with Sweden and elected themselves a new king, right? Haakon VII."

Éloïse's shadow walks past his face as she walks across the office. "That's the media's presentation of it." She bends over a record player to blow dust off its stylus. The debris curls up like a comber billowing against the wall. "They neglect the full version."

Eugene's blood pumps faster. "And what's the full version?"

Éloïse unsheathes a vinyl record from its case and places it under the gramophone's spiral groove. Music enshrouds the room as violins whine over Ruth Etting baaing, _Ten Cents A Dance._ "The full version acknowledges and accepts Elsa's father."

 _―"I won't deal with exiles,"_ Eugene remembers Weselton belting out. "...He was exiled, I'm guessing?"

Éloïse sits down on her husband's divan. "Not exactly. Prince Agnarr of Schleswig-Holstein was the head of the House of Glücksburg and Oldenburg by way of agnatic primogeniture. Her mother's ancestry was based in Norway's early dynasties. Because both had Norwegian kings from the House of Sverre in their family tree, they were nominated to be the King and Queen of Norway.

However, her father abdicated due to reasons unknown to us all, so Prince Carl, who is now King Haakon VII, took his place. The Storting condescendingly demoted Agnarr's style of address to His Highness of Sverre _and_ Schleswig-Holstein. His remarriage to a socialite of Sicilian and Gypsy blood is what played into his social expulsion."

Éloïse waits for Eugene to lap all that up, but his stomach acids are still trying to break it down into smaller molecules.

"So, based on what you're saying, Elsa _is_ a purebred princess..."

"Yes."

Following a gulp or two, Eugene speaks with his forehead still wearing the same wrinkle of perplexity, "And, her mother―"

"Died. He married Gothel Baldoni a month after her death, before overdosing on prescription pills a month after their marriage."

Eugene's thoughts clang against the "tea" Éloïse had spilled earlier:

 _―"Is this 'Mère' Gothel inviting me or my husband? That vieille pute delivered this to spite me."_

Éloïse unloads more Chamomile, "Gothel was a man-eater. All found her relationship with Agnarr suspicious after he began to isolate himself in Gamlehaugen Castle, but he was mentally unwell, so his peculiar actions were the result of emotional instability."

Eugene thoughtfully bites around his thumbnail before snatching it out. "...But, going back to the topicat hand,"―he scoots forward―"what you're saying for certain is that Elsa _does_ still hold a princess title, and definitely has German relatives in the underbrush?"

"Certainly. Glücksburg is the the cradle of European royalty. Agnarr himself is a descendant of Haakon V of Norway, Emperor Alexander II of Russia, Queen Victoria, Christian III of Denmark, and more. Cognatically, he was the 478th in line for the British throne, and in Germany, where Glücksburg Castle is located, Agnarr chaired the castle's board of directors and banked off revenues.

After abdication, he was allowed to keep his headship along with the ducal house's duchies. Elsa bears, "Princess of Sverre and Schleswig-Holstein," yet not the title that would secure income, which is the Duchess of Glücksburg. Like Agnarr, she is also the titular Duchess of Schleswig-Holstein _,_ but the united duchies are not under her possession. Greedy warmongers own pimp them."

The siren in Eugene's parietal lobe flashes red and blue. "Do you know whether Elsa has ― I don't know, maybe _relatives_ or in-laws of German descent who aren't nobles?"

"Last I checked, all of her relatives are and were either royal figures, married to royal figures, or highborn. Through the blood of King Haakon V, King Haakon VII and his son are also her kinsmen, you know."

Eugene's heart cracks down the equator. The room he sits in turns into a cellblock of grayscale colors. _'...Then she can't be what I'm thinking.'_

"Did that do it for you?" probes Éloïse.

Eugene drives his fingers up his forehead to feel how many sweat blobs his pores have secreted. Sighing, he removes his palm and frowns at Éloïse. The bags under his eyes are apparent. "Tell me about the old woman. What's her résumé?"

"Baldoni used to be a prominent burlesque dancer in America and Paris. That all stopped when she married Agnarr. She's raised Elsa since the thistle was a toddler. From my understanding, she even mooched off the pension that King Haakon VII gave Agnarr."

Eugene scoffs, "Sounds like a Poison Ivy who made sure to get what she wanted out of the deal."

"Only just." Éloïse's attention drifts over to the invitation on the drop-leaf table. "What she doesn't receive is the financial coverage his Dano-German duchies insure. I don't know what King Haakon VII's second letters patent said or how Agnarr's will works, but I suppose Gothel didn't get that part of it. Glücksburg Castle stands untouched."

Studying the card mutually, Eugene slides the back of his finger across the length of his mouth. "Passed down to the heiress, probably..."

"I think not. I've distanced myself from what happens in Germany, so I don't know who gets those revenues today, but I can tell you that it's not Elsa. Maybe she isn't of the age the will demands, or maybe the Fuhrer stonewalled her. At any cost, they have King Haakon VII's private wealth in their pincers and still look for odd ways to add to their holdings."

"Is that why they're here? To cash in on Goldwater's tourists?"

"Earnings are booming here while Norway's are plummeting. Why wouldn't they immigrate to where people would spend mindlessly on their glamour? It's the land of legalized 'gluttony' and 'greed.'"

Eugene's replies are switched to auto-pilot as his sentience fades away. "It's beyond that. Goldwater is where people go to forget about their problems. Outteridge is where people go to test their limits..."

Éloïse's tobacco tube seesaws up and down as she taps the end of it reminiscently. "...I confess to having paid for one of Elsa's lives in Oslo to forget about mine." Her chest flattens as smoke escapes her puckered lips. "She's obnoxiously exquisite. When she dances―..." Éloïse's lips squeeze her tongue before trembling back open―"you can't help but be bewitched by her eyes..."

A conscious part of Eugene vegs out while Éloïse commentates in the backdrop. The room begins to house only Elsa's diamanté eyes and sequined gown the longer he stares at them. He finds something sedative about the way her body dazzles and winks at him like an hourglass of sapphires in its frozen posture. Soon it is Flynn's eyes that are feeding on Elsa's shimmer as if they have lost themselves in the flames of a bonfire.

Ruth Etting's bleats thicken the spell, _"Come on, big boy, ten cents a dance. Fighters and sailers and bow-legged tailors can pay for their tickets and rent me; tough guys who tear my gown..."_

"Do you want to fuck her?"

The astral experience snaps like an ankle.

"Even before you started looking at her like she was an old lover, you looked at her like you wanted to fuck her." Éloïse smiles. "Now you're looking at her like you want her to sit on your face so you can have it go down in Flynn Rider Legend that you ate out a "real" princess."

Whiskey sprays out of Flynn's mouth. He can't push the other mouthful down the right windpipe, so he's left with punching his chest. " _That_ was"―cough―" ** _completely_** uncalled for."

"Women can talk about fucking just like men can," Éloïse counters.

Flynn looks at her through the moist fog framing his vision.

"We need to be fucked as much as men do, too."

The hot air balloon they were trapped in is punctured by Barnard yawping behind the door, _"Je ne pouvais pas trouver le chéquier, Madame Éloïse."_

Much like Weselton did in his own office, Éloïse gets angry. " _Quelle?_ "

" _Il est introuvable._ "

"...Fine," Éloïse settles. " _Je vous remercie beaucoup, Barnard."_

 _"_ _De rien, Madame Éloïse."_

Flynn didn't have any subtitles for this exchange, so when she gets up to open a chifforobe with a chest of more drawers, he doesn't know what it is that she's looking for next.

"You can keep the invitation card, Flynn." Éloïse smooths a hand over the curls on the side of her head. "I won't be attending, but my husband will, so be sure to greet him along with her husband for me."

Time stops. Even Flynn's words sound like they're being spoken in slow motion, "...I'm sorry, but did you just say _her_ husband?"

"You do know she's the wife of Hans Westergaard, don't you?"

Flynn blinks, and then squints, smirking at her despite the fact that he is soured by these gleanings. "...Let me check." He rubs his chin before blaring, " ** _No_**?"

"You didn't know Hans had gotten married?" Éloïse eyes him like she's waiting for him to vomit.

Truth be told, Flynn is having bowel movement problems. "This can't be real life." He transports himself to the velvet red fainting couch in case vertigo carjacks his motor responses. He knows from Weselton's squawking that the two had an affiliation, but how did Hans steal a tiara like Elsa? Such a feat imbues Flynn with an icky feeling called envy, and Heaven knows how much he hates envy; all the best jewels AND women in the world were supposed to be Flynn's, not Hans's.

"Would you mind enlightening me on when in the world _that_ Beauty and the Beast production went global?"

"Their union didn't. But aren't or weren't you friends with him and his brothers?"

Yugh. Definitely not with the Great Whites. "I haven't been 'friends' with anyone since I went on the r―...erm, vacay."

"He hasn't been married long, but he's doubtlessly a full time husband."

Good grief! Hats off to the swordfish for locking Angelfish down, then. However ― "Hans isn't exactly what I'd call **husband material** , so this is pretty bamboozling even if you were telling me this as a practical joke."

"It's no shtick. When it comes to Elsa, he's as twitterpatted as every other man in Europe."

Flynn's expression goes flatter than a frying pan. "... _I_ doubt it."

If Hans plans on selling this kind of performance to reporters like Éloïse, then he needs to figure out the difference between cheap comedy and quality satire. But, contrariwise, maybe it isn't staged. Maybe this beauty queen did inject him with that "cuddle hormone" he clinically lacks, or perhaps her pedigree woke up the hard-on of the Hyde in his Jekyll. Number two would be utterly understandable.

Flynn has one more question for the madness, though: "Is Hans her prince consort now that they've officially tied the knot?"

"You'll have to ask him," Éloïse says like he will. "I've never heard of him being called her prince consort just like I have never heard of Gothel being called Agnarr's princess consort. He will most likely be styled, "His Grace" when Elsa turns twenty-one just as a formality, but Elsa's background puts him beneath her in every way, and dynastic succession laws refuse to acknowledge non-royal spouses in any form unless the successor petitions for it. Still, Hans will be provided for; that handsome lycan always gets his hand in a cookie jar, doesn't he?"

"Sugar foot," Flynn patronizes, "you wouldn't know the half of it."

"These sugar feet know a false gumdrop or two. I also know you should be happy for your friend."

"Tuh." Flynn does a smart-ass loop of the eyes before looking elsewhere with a shake of the head. " _That'll_ be the day of never."

Fat stacks of money flop down onto the coffee table like unloaded fish.

Blink-blink-blink. "Um..." Flynn's eager fingers flutter against his knees. "Did yooou realize that you dropped your trust fund on the table or~...? What's...what's happening here?"

"Do you still charge per orgasm?"

"Wh-What...?" Flynn looks up.

Éloïse is holding what appears to be a silver canister that could've been mistaken for a floor vase.

 _'How the heck is she holding that thing?'_ Because he's still trying to understand why dough is sprouting out of a canister in the first place, he almost completely forgets about her question. "Would that be...?"

"An adult piggy-bank?" She screws the lid on it. "Jean doesn't know that he can hide extra cash from me and bank robbers by simply creating a second account in another country."

Flynn jumps at the _clink_ of the canister hitting the table as Éloïse places it there.

Éloïse sets a briefcase down beside it and begins packing the money away for him. "The checkbook isn't here, but this should cover expenses for things like food, clothing, whatever cabaret your landlord likes, and a cheap apartment for one year, but I can't add you to Jean's account or pay for your rent on a monthly basis." She nurses the head of her cigarette holder with her succulent lips again, but this time around, she inhales it like the intake will keep her from having a nervous breakdown.

Flynn shuts his gaping hole. "And, in exchange for this chicken feed, you want me to―"

"Do what you do best," she interrupts with her sad, smiling eyes. "Preferably, the―"

"'Oral therapy.'"

"...Exactly. Full time, until October." The way she stands as she demands sex from him reminds him of an uptight professor giving an oral presentation.

"This isn't usually―"

"Enough?" Éloïse peels out a roll of extra hundreds―

―"Are you coughing up cash he doesn't even have?" Flynn's question crowbars her skullcap.

Éloïse smiles gloomily at the canister to avoid touching eyes. "I wouldn't put it like that. Because of France's financial crisis, Jean came to Goldwater to sell Queen Marie-Amélie's parure to a private bidder here. When it got stolen, I was more upset than he was. For the right reasons, anyhow."

Flynn, who already knows about this tale due to having made a little cameo of his own, side-eyes her. "And yooou're telling me all of this, because...?"

She scoots next to him on the fainting couch. "Because these little bills he's stowed away are just bread crumbs compared to the French Crown Jewels he's been hocking. He won't be angry about some missing. If he is, he'll know it was me. The most he'll do is stop coming home for a year, but you won't get in trouble with my husband."

This sob story kills whatever erotic mood there could've been. Even without the nagging of Eugene, Flynn really feels like saying there is no eviction, landlord, or apartment. "...I~ don't think I'd feel too comfortable with you doi―"

"Please." Éloïse pushes a scroll of money down to his end of the table. "Just spare ten minutes..."

Flynn examines her.

She seems uncomfortable with the simple concept of meeting eyes. "I need something to look forward to today."

There is no point in chortling, _"The only thing you have to look forward to is an orgasm?"_ because he knows that it is. He can recall what she said on their first date well enough:

 _"I used to masturbate with my bible like a little heathen when I was a thistle,"_ she laughed.

 _"...Isn't that fascinating?"_ He tried to sound like he was used to pin-balling childhood sex chronicles over a bowl of spinach dip.

 _"The high I'd get afterwards was the only thing to look forward to."_

 _"Doesn't that go for all of God's children?"_ he satirized. _"An orgasm reminds us of anesthesia: you get pain relief, muscle relaxation, amnesia, and happy feelings. You don't hate Monday; you don't have problems; you don't have a lousy childhood. For a wink, it's nothing. Just an ozone of sweet, diddly, **zilch**."_

Finally, she locks gazes with him. "If you don't have ten, five is fine."

"...Now..." Flynn moves his arm behind her head to march his fingers up the back of her neck, making her smile. Cracking a halfhearted one himself, he thumbs away the fallen eyelash on her cheek and brings his voice down to an intimate key, "You _know_ you have to give me more credit than _that._ "

Titillated, Éloïse lets him warm the skin under her ear with his breath. Her eyes rock back into her skull like cue balls. She bites her lopsided lip as his nose runs down the stem of her throat before he sucks on its gumdrop. A sigh is shaken out of her. " _Oh,_ _monsieur..._ " Éloïse lays her cheek against his temple and cups his bobbing head to inhale a little bit of heaven. " _Yes_..."

French falls down the well of Flynn's ear in little solar flames, making him feel voltage from the insulators in his brain to the power lines of his wrists. He surfaces to graze her mouth with a pair of half-open lips. She releases a warbled _awe_ into his before trapping it with her whimpering one. The spicy breath she loved fills her mouth deeper than his tongue does. Smoke from her cigarette engulfs them as her back slowly kisses the couch's cushion.

While holding onto the blade of her heel, Flynn's other hand sails up the vein in her wrist to tilt her palm back until she's successfully squashed her cigarette against the ash tray behind her.

"This is going to last _much_ longer than ten minutes," he promises to the cleavage of emerald jewels on her rivière. It takes very little time for his teeth to find her soaked g-string. Shuddering at the beauty of his trophy, he makes do with suctioning Éloïse's sweet extract off of, out of, and around the slippery wet pearls. Exactly how much he has missed drinking nectar from duchy tulips reignites his addiction. Elsa's coy smile flashes in Flynn's mind right away, as if to remind him of the royal roses he has yet to hose down.

A diamond dress perched on a baroque throne accompanies the image, clothing Elsa in regalness.

 _'Oh, honey...'_ Flynn's pulsating lust for her drowns out Eugene's laments. _'Can't say I won't try to sip out of your crystal chalice pretty soon...'_ His eyelids flutter at the thought of her manicured nails digging into his shoulders as he sucks the moist meat off her pelvis in a throne room. The meat-hammer in his trousers aches for the fantasy to be real. _'She probably tastes like Cabernet Sauvignon wine straight from Napa valley...'_

Éloïse's fingernails bore into Flynn's scalp, pulling him back to the woman he had instead of the woman he wanted. "I miss feeling your goatee between my legs..." Sweat rolls down her body like coconut oil sliding between her thighs, greasing up her juicy mutton for him. "You're my only vice in this world..."

Flynn licks his lips. "And you're mine," the ex-vegetarian lies. He pulls Éloïse's g-string to the side and fills her with his tongue, purposely tickling the base of her womanhood with his wagging chin.

"H-Ha!" Éloïse's back snaps. " _Oh, s'il te plait._..! Fl-Flynn..."

"Mm-hm?" Flynn buries his nose into her valley while she rides his face. He uses one set of wet fingertips to gently probe her backdoor open.

" _Tu es parfait pour moi!_ " Éloïse's sharp heel drags up between the ravine of his shoulder blades as her hips pump up and down. " _Baise moi!_ I want to leave evidence of you on my husband's furniture..."

This corny request is a clear cry for attention ― and not his attention, but her husband's. Nevertheless, he too needs doses of anesthesia to numb a broken heart that won't be regrowing. If he had all the time in the world, he would have made her drapes his Eucharist. No frantic wrestling, no tactless groping, no relentless pow-wowing; just this slow, yogic odyssey with a rock-crashing finale to sweet, diddly, **zilch** ―

 _"Madame Éloïse_! _"_

Flynn isn't sure if a voice is knocking on the door or a knuckle, but he's in no hurry to stop breakfasting on Éloïse.

" _What_ , Barnard?" Éloïse whinnies achingly, opening her legs for Flynn's head to have more room.

" _Vous avez un invité dans le vestibule_."

Éloïse springs up and knees Flynn in the nose, who yowls out and rolls off the couch. " _Quel genre d'invité_?!"

" _Hans Westergaard, madame._ "

To say that Flynn threw up in his soul a little would've been the understatement of the century.

" _Je lui ai dit que vous étiez avec Monsieur Rider._ "

" _What_ did he just say?" he hisses at Éloïse, lips and chin still glistening with her cum.

About as white as he was, Éloïse holds her scalp as she checks her watch. _"Il est si tôt!"_ She scoops her bra off the ground and doubles it up, spanking off the filth. "He said he told him I'm your hostess!"

"What?" His larynx is full of helium. "Puh-LEASE tell me you're joking―"

"I'd like to be." Éloïse fixes herself up to a mirror, back-glancing only minutely to tell Flynn to cool his hot cakes. "You can stay in here; just stay **quiet**. ― _Dites Monsieur Hans Je serai là dans une minute, Barnard!_ "

Driblets race between Flynn's eyelids as he gnaws on his nails and rocks back and forth like a senile man in a rocking chair. There isn't any way on Hell or Earth that he'll be staying put. If Éloïse went to the bathroom, that Houdini could easily just invite himself into the office by undoing the locks with his evil witchcraft.

 _'Then c'mon, you moron! Hit the road!'_ Flynn is hysterically trying to put his body in _go_ , but his phalanges are cement. _'Oh God, oh God, I think I'm having a stroke―'_

"Flynn!" Éloïse throws his coat over his head. "Get yourself together already!"

Flynn tussles with the tent until he manages to drag it off his scalp, but his hair stands up with the static. "I'm paralyzed...!" he squeals.

"Oh, Rider..." Éloïse cleans the lipstick streak that stretches from his mouth to his ear. "He's waiting, not infiltrating―"

"Pumpkin?" Flynn catches her wrists to squat down and search her eyes for comprehensibility. " _Understand_ that I don't plan on sitting tight regardless of whether he's fire eating or flushing the toilet as we speak."

Éloïse turns her nose up. "I won't ask what your pickle is with him, but if it suits you, there are trellises by the windows in the villa."

Flynn smashes a groaning kiss against her forehead before stepping back to swing his jacket over his head. "You're a lifesaver, El." He slips his arms through the sleeves and pops his collar. "We'll give this a sequel later."

"Very soon, I presume. You won't be able to escape with the briefcase, so I'll bring it to you." She passes him his glasses. "Can you meet me tonight in Outteridge?"

"Outteridge?" Flynn squints, seating his eyewear's legs on his ears. He flings his sleeves open and then crosses his arms. "Where, exactly?"

"Velvet? Nine-forty?"

"...The cabaret?"

"Where we first dined."

Flynn pockets what he can from the open briefcase. "Y'sure?"

She nods. " _Oui_."

"... _Velvet_ it is." Their lips smack after a short smooch. "But..." He lifts the blue invitation card between them. "May I borrow Her Highness for a wink?"

Éloïse glares at Elsa's model before cranking up an eyebrow at him.

He peeks his head out over the top. " _Strictly_ for extracurricular purposes, of course."

"Do what you like," Éloïse tuts. "It's your sanity, not mine."

"...Cryptic much?"

"Just a little humor, monsieur." Éloïse reels him in by the nape for a third kiss, moaning as he inserts his pink thruster.

Flynn circles his arms around her and cocks his head.

She drags her lips out of his to chomp her teeth down on his ear lobe. " _Au revoir_ , you cheeky chimp."

Flynn chuckles nervously against the back of her own ear, " _Au revoir_."

She pecks his throat and releases him, panting from their sloppy kiss. He moves his hands down her tailbone, giving her fanny a playful spank before sliding them off her hamstrings. Éloïse power-walks to the door while teasing her frizz. Flynn waves his fingertips at her. She smiles coquettishly against her shoulder and waves back before closing the door.

 _'About time.'_ Without further ado, Flynn fusses with the locks on Jean's windows. It takes a fireplace poker and ten rattles later to call it quits. " _Oh,_ for the love of Bilbo!" El's latches were caked with so much grime that they wouldn't budge, which meant that he'd have to go down the corridor and pass the anteroom to get to the bathroom window.

"... _I_ hate my life _ever_ so passionately." Flynn uses his liquor flask to make himself feel a twinge better about it. After fighting down a snorty cough, he shakes his head and rolls back his shoulders. " _D'uh_...h'okay. Let's get this over with."

The tippler opens the office door and creeps into the hallway. Moving through the shadows isn't all that scary once he's in it, but hearing Hans is a hair-raiser. The grandee's symphonic voice is characteristic of a homebody dropping off apple pie to a new neighbor. Flynn shivers. He can remember every fiber, follicle, and freckle on this man so intimately that he doesn't need to look inside the anteroom.

Flynn pictures a thought bubble of Éloïse shaking Hans's gloved hand while she pats the hindpart of her hair, taken as she probably would be by his savoir-faire. Thanks to Weselton, Éloïse and Hans have been swimming in the same reef for years, but Flynn has never watched them cross streams. However, they were chuckling together like old cronies now, and he realizes that he's lost the thread of the conversation.

"I've missed you and Weselton, but I don't think I could be made to go to Arendelle, Monsieur Westergaard," Éloïse apologizes. "I was given the impression that it would have a lot of magic shows, but burlesque and aerial ribbon dancing has never aroused me."

"That saddens me to hear," Hans grieves. "Laars would've loved to have seen you in your natural habitat."

 _'Talk about nice-nasty.'_ Flynn attempts to pop in a glance in order to locate them.

Hans's getup wows him. With his cream hat pressed against the chest of his cream suit, the fancy wanker is the picture of sophisticated grace. His shiny ginger hair looks more shampooed than ever, and his skin is so spotless that it seems painted on.

 _'Who increased his money flow so that he could get a new paint job?'_

Hans circles Éloïse as his green eyes admire every latticed cranny of the vestibule like he's in a museum.

"Your wife is quite a show, though," Éloïse praises, stroking the inside of her blouse.

Hans's chuckle sounds more like a bashful _tiff._ "Elsa's―...definitely an _entertainer_ at heart, for all her humility." He faces Éloïse with his hat behind his back. "Forgive me, but would you mind if I...?"

"No, please."

" _Merci_."

They both get comfortable on a davenport sofa. Flynn can't see anything past Hans's mouse ears, but he can see a sliver of Éloïse's profile, and she looks shaken up. As much as he would hate to leave a damsel in distress, his distress means a whole lot more to him right now. Flynn tip-toes his way past the anteroom's entrance and dogtrots into her bathroom. Unbolting a window, he contorts his body into a rat's until both legs are through the lucarne.

Gravity's favor enables him to skid down the roof's tiles and tightrope the eaves. The nightmarish sight of Francis and Erik peering inside Eloise's Hispano-Suiza makes him flail off balance for a moment. Flynn jams Elsa's casino card between his teeth, retraces his steps, and then progresses towards the back of the villa. The trellis is easy to prop his feet on, but climbing down the panels is a rickety maneuver. He drops earthwards and kisses the pavement twice before dashing behind the shrubberies.

Flynn's powdery hands find the backyard's gate, and beyond the backyard's gate, freedom.


	4. ༺(Meat City)༻

_"I was not abandoned as a child. I left."_ **― Dane Cook**

* * *

"First of all, no. Second of all, _**no**_."

"Oh ― come ― _on_. Show a little _humanity_ ―"

"Dah-ah, _save it_. I'm _not_ in the mood, so go bother someone else."

"But Krissy―"

"It's **Kristoff**."

"Capisce! Now, ABOUT that storage―"

"Do I seriously have to repeat myself twice? You're the one who left all your stuff behind to get stolen. You should be grateful that some of it is in good hands." There are many words to describe Kristoff Bjørgman, but pleasant and tolerable are not two of them. "Besides, I _need_ to stay _focused_." The blonde Yetti barring Flynn from his quest continues to flay off ribbons of wood as he changes the angle of his reindeer figurine.

Flynn's fingernails dance on the counter like spider legs. "And while that all looks tre- _men-_ dously exciting―"

"Not happening." Kristoff touches his dimple with his tongue. "Finders keepers, right?"

Flynn shuts his eyes and chuckles. " _Oh_ -kay, so _look_..." He perches his hand on his chest, trying to see around Kristoff's shoulder as the Sámi bends down to tie his boot laces. "Those things? Aren't just _mine_ ―"

"Oh, really?" Kristoff stands up to ask sarcastically, "That naked bronze sculpture of Lady of the Lake on her knees isn't yours?"

...Flynn snatches his fingers into his palms and then slides back. "Awww'righty, so maybe _that_ was mine, yes...but the _other_ stuff ― like the, the _paintings_ , the French easel, the wooden palette, the unused canvases―"

"In Grandpabbie's cellar. Great stuff, by the way. Didn't know you liked or did oil paintings."

"I don't. I mean, I _do_ ― I just don't paint! Look, can't you cut me a little slack here? I'm going to be stuck in Outteridge for way longer than I want to be, so I'm trying to do the right thing for once." ― By not robbing this Yetti blind _,_ that is.

"You're wastin' your time, Flynn."

"... _G'ad_ , y'know...! Just what _is_ it that you have against me? Have―I― _ever_ once told you to take a shower and spritz on a little air freshener?"

"It's simple, really." Kristoff puts the figurine down to place both palms on the counter's edges. "I don't _trust_ you," he snarls. "You're a backstabbing, _free_ -loading, _cheap-skate_. And while I may not be able to prove that you stole Grandpabbie's Amazonite pendant, _"_ _―_ he waves the handle of his knife at him―"I _know_ you're a crook. Didja steal that, too?" Kristoff jabs the handle in the direction of the garment bag on the table.

Flynn shakes his head at him with a disbelieving smile. "... _No_ , Detective Holmes." He blinks dryly. "I **bought** it."

"Tch!" Kristoff knuckles his nose before returning to his so-called masterpiece. "Yeah, right. Like that'll ever happen."

"...Looks as though I have to draw out the _big_ guns, then." The playboy pushes some hard cash to the center of the counter.

Kristoff wrinkles his snout at it. "What's that supposed to be?"

Flynn folds his hands smugly. "Legal tender. Ever heard of it?"

Kristoff eyes him. "...Is this some kind of trap?"

"Kristina, just think of me as your fairy godmother." Flynn leans into his face, "I'm _trying_ to make life better for you and your little family back there―"

"It's **Kristoff**!"

"―and I have enough bread to get you back to Norway like you've always dreamed of. You _do_ want to be reunited with your reindeer farm, don't you?"

"It's not a reindeer farm _,_ it's _―_...! You know what? Forget it. I'm done. Just get out. You're not getting your 'trinkets' back after a whole year of being MIA, so you can just stop while you're ahead. Now take your blood money with you before I call the cops."

" _D'oh_ , come on!" Flynn claws at the air before balling his fists down at his sides. "What is it gonna take for me to get my stuff back?!"

Sighing angrily, Kristoff props his elbow on the table and strokes his temple. "Listen, here's the deal." He lifts his gaze to point all four fingers at Flynn. "Your yacht? Has been in the impounded dock for _seven months_. Your lady friend stopped paying for anchorage twelve months ago without hacking up a single dime for the late fees. Since you're the one who actually operates the thing as co-registrant _,_ you know how things work with marina contracts in Goldwater. Now, you can still pay Grandpabbie's storage fees, late fees, repo fees, _and_ your whole backrent if you've got the dough, but we can't do anything about your stolen junk―"

"That is, except for hoarding it _yourselves,_ of course," Flynn implants bitterly.

" _Hey_ , once you took yourself out of the picture, you took your ownership out of it, too. There are plenty of homeless people around Goldwater these days, Flynn. You're not the only one with problems."

"...And yet _here_ you are calling _me_ the crook."

"We're two different species; **trust** me on that."

"Oh, I can assure you that I don't have Sasquatch DNA running through my veins, but whatever it is you want? _I_ can give you. I have the 'dough' and the honey to pay for the yacht's fees upfront. However, your 'Grandpabbie' and I made a deal yesterday about my _junk_."

"Don't know anything about it."

Flynn grunts. "Fine. You know what? _You're_ not the marina owner I need to be speaking to―"

"Grandpabbie is sick, so he's not seeing anyone today. Isn't that obvious enough by the simple fact that I'm covering for him?"

"You're not covering for him; you're lazing around his office so you don't hafta anchor anyone's boats―"

"Nope. _All_ lies."

―"and even if that was the truth, can you imagine how angry he'd be if you didn't tell him that I dropped by with _this_ part of the money order?" Flynn pulls a pearl out of his pocket and plants it on the table with a _clack._

"...And _that_ would be...?"

"...What're you, blind? It's a pearl!"

Now Kristoff shows interest, but unlike Weselton, he tries to downplay it. "...Is that actually...?"

"Real? You bet your musk it's real."

Fascinated, Kristoff tosses it up and catches it in his palm. "Wait..." He sneers. " _I_ wanna know where you got this."

Flynn holds up a g-string with dancing eyebrows.

"...UGH!" Kristoff drops it.

"HEY, hey, heeeey! Watch the merchandise!" Flynn snatches it off the table before it hits the floor. "That's an exceptionally fragile margarite, I'll have you know!"

"I don't wanna have my hands on some gonorrhea-infested, genital-chafing g-string from one of your disciples, you dingbat! If you think Grandpabbie is going to accept _that_ thing off _that thing_ , then you're even scummier than I thought you were―"

"Kristina, it's been _well_ polished, so you and your granddaddy don't have to worry about catching Chlamydia."

" _How_ well polished, Flynn? And by what?! Your tongue?!"

And jewelry cleaner. "Polished enough for Grandpa to blow your whole teepee down for not telling him that I dropped by with it." Flynn sways the g-string back and forth like a butcher dangling steak in front of a vegetarian. "Now do we have a deal? Because if Grandpa doesn't want them, I know a _whole_ herd of warthogs who _do,_ " he bluffs.

Kristoff sucks his teeth. The edges of Flynn's grin can almost feel his own ears. Krissy's muskrat relatives have been salivating over shiny thingamabobs since Flynn was a tadpole. Tobacco pipes, silverware, mineral stones, diamond necklaces, **retirement plans** ― they were all treasures in their shrine of foreign mementos; what Flynn needs from that shrine is contraband that Grandpabbie held hostage. His fam knew how to jack the possessions of yacht owners like nobody's business, including loot that Eugene would have had a fit over on _**her**_ behalf.

Flynn wrongly thought that peddling a sob story would sway Bigfoot to help him out with the latter matter. The belongings he named in the preface of their exchange are definitely _**hers**_ , but he plans on burning those to further drive Eugene underwater. What he's really after is―

"...Come back Sunday," Kristoff decides.

Flynn doesn't want to hear that, though. "What?! _Sun_ -day―"

"That's when Grandpabbie should be well enough to see you. Take it or leave it."

Flynn groans.

"Deal?"

Flynn pouts. "...Deal."

They shake on it.

"What've you been traveling back and forth in for over a year, anyway?" Kristoff asks. He always manages to make his curiosity sound and look like indifference.

"Eh ― just a little schooner." Flynn's pride shows its horns.

"...That fancy schooner out there is yours?" Flynn can tell that Kristoff wants to say, _'Nice,'_ but instead he says, "Who was stupid enough to buy you that thing?"

"A finder and a keeper once upon a time ago."

"...And a married one, I'm assuming."

"Widowed, presumably. Her furrier of a husband was attacked by a dalmatian."

"...It's Cruella, isn't it?"

" _Wouldn't_ you like to know?"

"And, _why_ do you always fool around with people's wives again?"

"Because wives, my good Samaritan, are the loneliest women on the planet. The bodies of those poor creatures need to be held, loved, and _cherished_ by healing hands such as mine in order for them to experience the true meaning of freedom in their pitiful little lives."

"...You're dead serious about that whole oration, aren't you?"

"Call it community service, Kristina. A twenty-four hour charity organization that never―stops― _giving_."

"...Do you try to make people barf? Because your whole moral compass is so cracked beyond repair that I don't even think Satan would welcome you with open arms―..." Kristoff stops ranting when he figures out that Flynn has stopped listening.

The rehired gigolo looks like he just found a spaceship in his backyard.

Kristoff turns around to review the main attraction behind him. "...Tch!" The blonde rolls his eyes. "Figures..." He turns back around to Flynn and folds his arms on the counter. " _So_...you going?" Kristoff motions his head to the poster Flynn is stuck on.

"...I'm _contemplating_ , Kristina," Flynn says quietly, never ungluing his gaze from Elsa's smile. "Just contemplating..."

Kristoff smirks at him with a tapered eye. " _Uh_ -huh."

* * *

It is already past six when Flynn leaves the marina for Living Rock Harbor's 24 hour fitness gym. He showers up in the facility's humid washroom, having had no access to the water pump in his own cruiser for the entire morning. From there, he lopes back to his schooner. Tourists promenade around the boardwalk outside of his porthole as he layers his drippy hair and sculpts his goatee in his bathroom mirror. He slaps pomade onto his scalp before dusting off his new top hatand yanking on a spiffy dinner jacket. Once the peaked lapels are popped, he pins on a boutonnière and swaggers into town.

 _―_ _"Can you meet me tonight in Outteridge?_ _Velvet? Nine-forty?"_

Going off photographic memory, the cabaret is a block down from the sporting district's _Nude Flick_ theater, but it is also two addresses too close to his childhood. Éloïse is asking for a little much. Nevertheless, he'll ask for even more.

― _"_ _Jean came to Goldwater to sell Queen Marie-Amélie's parure to a **private bidder** here."_

Flynn passes through an artery of tenements in the urban lung of the bay area. There is a hopelessness, a cancerous hopelessness and economic bronchitis in the vicinity, that hadn't been there back when he was a frequenter. Because he is unable to get a cab to helicopter him out, he is subjected to fending off its tapeworms in the womb.

"Well, wouldja lookit dat piece of ass?" Smoke plumes from the cigarette holders of topless women who lean across their balcony railings. "Ol' Robin Hood's come back to rescue us from the ghettos!"

An empty can strikes the pavement behind Flynn's oxfords, followed by a cataract of catcalls. Flynn squeezes one eye shut to look up at the women with the other. Two broken bras smack him square in the face. His hecklers laugh as they shake their breasts at him. He removes the garments with a mechanical smirk and nudges them between his teeth, tipping his hat to be a good sport. Receiving nothing more than wolf-whistles, he swaggers on until he can find a trashcan to dump the bras into.

In thirty minutes, Flynn finds himself winding down, leaving the shadows of the sidewalk to stand under a street lamp and gaze up at the only unlit window on the block. _'Damn it,'_ ―his noggin screams― _'I got sidetracked and made the wrong turn.'_

Unlike the other windows, this one has a familiar column of rusty metal bars. He makes every attempt to bow his head and shade his eyes as he passes by, but he can't stop staring at the sunflowers on the curtains. That's when he really starts having scary hallucinations. A shadow skips back and forth across the drapes with a ghostly hum tailing behind it. The pits of his nostrils grow hot and moist.

 _'You're just seeing things. It isn't **real**.'_

Two high beams suddenly light up the street. Barking dogs paw the jingling barbed wire fences on the block. Flynn crosses his arms over his frame to round his back. Headlights walk across the trees, windows, and him as a black Daimler swings into the neighborhood. Its wheels roll slowly, chewing on the pine cones that spike the road.

For some reason, the six-seater stops in the belly of the street. The automobile just sits there with its engine tittering, giving Flynn enough time to reckon that it didn't belong to Weselton or Hans. Steadily but suspiciously, the Daimler comes back to life and trundles through the hood, pulling his shadow off the curb. Flynn tells himself to chill out;tricks always drove in and out of Harlot Land to pluck a floozy from the gully. All that 3pm-6pm chugalugging must've made him _way_ too tipsy for this field trip.

He barely finishes stacking his nerves off the sidewalk when someone else comes lumbering down the boulevard of broken dreams. The very movement of another lurker coming at him in the dark makes adrenaline put that senseless fear into his blood. As the person nears the nearest sodium lamp, he sees that there is no emergency. The silhouette belongs to an old granny. Odd, but old, and therefore, harmless. Oblivious to him standing there, she steps onto a porch two doors down and sifts through a bouquet of keys.

Flynn sweeps his sleeves and doubles back.

"...Y'back, Eugene Fitzherbert?"

His leather oxfords stop dead in their tracks. He looks over his shoulder and pales at his caller. The old lady behind him is an Einstein-haired dwarf with a turtle's hard, bony jaws, and her dress is a throwback to the Regency period of Great Britain, something that looks quite hysterical next to the cigarette in her hand. To add creepiness to ugliness, her puny pupils can pass for the eyes of a Praying Mantis.

...Then it whangs him. "M―M...M-Madam Beatrice!" Hell freezes over. "...Whaaat a _coincidence_!" He tries to sing it instead of shriek it. "I-I-I was just―... _strolling_ through the neighborhood~!"

She stares. And stares. And stares.

His horror starts to dial down the more he takes her scruffy appearance into account. "Wait, what're you...doing _here_ on Madam Hester's turf?"

Beatrice's knotty throat has trouble swallowing. "Whore's dead, so her girls be my girls now."

"What?" The news upsets him. "But...what about―"

Her brittle hand, which is dotted with warts and sunspots, flicks the inquiries away. "Don't sell boys anymore. They're bad meat in the market now." She covers her coughing mouth with her wrist. "Gave my agency, my nephews, and my orphans up to a Johnny who could put them to better use." She hocks up a loogie and spits onto her portico.

His stomach goes _eek_. "Oh, well that's..." ― _' **just** as inhumane of you as I remember.'_

"Times is hard, y'know.―So y'back, Fitzherbert?"

He feels his boyhood eating at him the more she bulldozes through his candlestick ribs with that name. That morbid, fatherless name. To make matters worse, he stands there fumbling with his fancy hat, slipping back into the filthy shirt of that lonely, bookworm orphan who tucked his heart into bean cans with a paper-cut thumb.

"Asked you a question, boy."

Eugene cowers. Rotating the brim of his head wear, he backs up one time and gulps. " _No,_ I'm ― not officially―"

"I mean back _here,_ boy."

"No, ma'am." _'No, **ma'am**?'_ "I―I―I mean, _no_. Still solo."

"'Solo?' Huh! Like mother, like son."

He frowns.

Madam Beatrice looks straight at his soul. "You still look good, Eugene." Her gaze is more direct than a trick's feeling up a callgirl. "Good as you could in this business, anyway." She grins with her yellow teeth and pushes her door open.

Eugene shoves his hat onto his head. "Beatrice―"

She rewinds her steps to poke her head out from behind the portico's pillar. "Yeah, boy?"

He gulps harder than the first time. "...Do you know if...Madam Hester still has that room empty? Or to phrase it better: do _you_ still have it empty?"

She reads his mind. "No whore wants to sleep in there. Tryna come up? You can come up." Her invitation had other implications that his childhood was familiar with. "You can get a smile, too."

"Not today," he denies. "Maybe another day."

"Any day is good." She shows her rotten teeth again. "I'm free any day."

Eugene's genitals ache from an old body memory that involves teeth marks. "I'll keep that in mind."

"Then stay safe, scalawag. The real pirates are your tricks." The conversation ends with her slamming her front door.

Eugene is on the verge of tears he doesn't recall holding back. Walking to a busier street, he finally gets himself a cab to abandon that orphaned boy on Beatrice's porch. _'Sorry, but I can't take you home with me.'_

"Where y'goin', champ?" belches the cab driver.

Eugene massages his temples in the backseat. _'What's the matter with you? Why didn't you go up?'_

The grunt of the other man he has been all his adult life lends its psychiatric advice:

 _'And then what? What are you going to do? Feel sorry for yourself? Reminisce over the wallpaper of some teenaged traitor who got herself killed? You didn't know her from a can of paint; she made a point of that, so pick yourself up and get over it so you can get out.'_

"Hey." The cab driver looks at him from the rear view mirror. "Where y'off to?"

Flynn's breath wheezes through his pipes. " _Shit_...um..." He opens his swollen eyes to the window, sniffing. The voice that squeezes between his lips is congested with Eugene's sadness: "Th-The sporting district, please."

"The sport'n district! Gonna get lucky ta'night with a classier bimbo, 'uh?" The driver chews on his toothpick. "Yeeeah, I never liked 'dis dump. Dem broads ain't clean. Used ta' be a real fancy joint back when Beatrice was a Southern Bell, though." He turns the wheel and drives off.

* * *

Regaining control over the sniveling mess that Eugene had left Flynn's vessel in was harder than Rider hoped it would be. The next hurdle he has to hop is Outteridge's five star amusement strip, which wears the name, _"Gold Rush"_ rather proudly. Jazzy and uptown, it parallels those parts of Las Vegas where pavements sparkle like stars and marquees flash like Christmas lights. The crème de la crème of Goldwater always traveled with the glitterati of Hollywood, bagging more attention from tourists than the street performers themselves. Nightly water shows and pedestrian mall concerts would have made any ingenue think Gold Rush was a dream, but in truth, the El Dorado is one big gutter hole on the morality chart.

Flynn peeks through his window to get an eyeful of what he doesn't miss: escorts of both genders noodle around nightclubs with elderly men kissing their necks while his cab cruises on by. Sex tourists are being wagoned to brothels on two-wheeled carts pulled by Chinese runners. Freaks in weird costumes gambol down the boulevard with trumpets and drummer bands. A pack of gussied up orphans are in the process of mugging a clueless millionairess in a diner. A saloon owner calls himself shattering a bottle over the head of some drunkard in his alley before siccing his goons on him.

Only two things regenerate Flynn's red blood cells: Elsa and her tush. Both stunners are everywhere ― literally everywhere. Back at Éloïse's joint, he wanted to be balls-deep in her business, but now, he's starting to feel haunted by this bombshell. Billboard workers have obviously just finished installing Arendelle's ads on every corner to spite him. The sky-hoggers flaunt the same illustration that scintillated on his card, but the difference this time is that they feature an extra honey.

"Gothel Baldoni?" he chuckles out loud, reading the poster tacked up on _Velvet's_ wall while he stands in front of it. "This is too much."

Gothel's body is blown up in size, likening Elsa to a mere logo. Any tool in the shed could've guessed that she's a pampered hussy, and quite honestly, she doesn't look too rough. No touch-up can hide her age, but she's full-figured ― maybe more so than what he usually likes ― and her angular bone structure is framed by a gorgeous jungle of black curls. Those grey eyes and red lips of hers smirk lazily at Outteridge, daring the whole town to knock her off her throne.

Flynn fingers the bent flap of Arendelle's poster. He'll have to swing by the unopened thirst-trap ASAP.

"Will they sit there forever, Robert?"

Flynn jiggles his pockets before glancing beside him. A married couple happens to be grading a collection of eighteen year olds in display windows. Above them blinks the letters, "Tour Guides!" to semi-obscure the fact that they're escorts. The livestock includes boys and girls, orphans and adoptees, sex-trafficked foreigners and whorehouse-born citizens. Outteridge rolls out the only red light district Flynn knows of where men can be as much of a booming meat business as women.

"Not forever," disclaims the husband. "Compare them to geishas. They're not sitting there to be prostituted, they're sitting there to be chosen as company. Only a few will graduate to the top of popularity till they're finally able to be auctioned off to the highest bidding baron. That baron will then support them for however long they wish before passing them around their circle of friends after they're through."

"Close, but not quite," Flynn haughtily interrupts without realizing it.

The couple sizes him up. "Beg your pardon?"

"...Um, nothing. Just, uh, _passing~_ through!" Flynn lifts his hat off his head to pardon himself. "You two have a _lovely_ evening." He confidently wraps his fingers around Velvet's bronze handle and boogies in.

Scoping out the premise for bloodsuckers is his first priority. It's no secret to the VIPs of the underworld that weird stuff goes down in Velvet. Sexy, pelvic-thrusting stuff, but weird stuff, too ― stuff that keeps Hans _way_ away. Once he sees the surprisingly friendly-looking corridor, Flynn doesn't hesitate to wink at the hags standing under the vaulted ceiling. Their expressions straddle disgust and adoration ― as if his sudden arrival to their high society is as horrifying as it is exotic ― and he loves it.

"That would be―"

"―Isn't his name...?"

"―Flynn _Rider_ ," purrs the young hostess behind the stand. "Just my luck." The nubile is decked out in a pearl headband and one of those beaded _Atlantic Flapper_ dresses with a carwash hem.

 _'I'm better already.'_ His testicles do the river dance as he rubs eyeballs with her. Stoked, Flynn jogs up to her and drums his knuckles on the lectern. " _Evening_ , Ruth." He rests his hand on his wrist to lean in with his shoulder. " _You're_ looking phe- _nomenal_ as always."

Smirking like nobody's business, Ruth parks her elbows on the stand and wags her caboose. "Got a reservation, Dollface?"

" _That_ I might." Flynn pets the vein in her arm with his middle finger. "It should be under~"

"Flynn Rider, of course."

He wraps his lips under his teeth and teeters into her space to make sure that he heard her correctly.

"That's what I have down." Ruth looks up from her chart. "Your buttermilk cow called in for you."

"...She did?"

"Sure did. She'll be late, though." She collects two menus and ditches the stand, beckoning him to follow her with the twitch of her curled finger.

Though a tad baffled, he tailgates her anyway, and sure enough, he doesn't regret it. The cabaret has been renovated, so its interior design looks a helluva lot closer to the Palais Bourbon palace than the dark grotto it used to be. Lovebirds mingle between the classical colonnade in formal gear fit for the opera, cooling themselves with Brisé fans as they chunter. The stage facing the establishment introduces a beautiful colored girl to the audience. Prudes would've been up in racist arms about it, but Gold Rush is willing to smuggle in all types of performers because law enforcers are willing to overlook whatever keeps Goldwater afloat.

"You like Coloreds, do you?" Ruth's words sound sardonic. "Name's Tiana. She's a blues singer."

"I like _women_ , Sweetheart," Flynn simplifies. He almost peppers it with, "Because all women are the same color when you bend them over in the dark." However, racially scatological ― and unfailingly sexist ― comments like those are better received by other men.

"Typical." Ruth steers him up a flight of stairs and then parts a red curtain for his head to duck under. "No liquor flask in the joint, Beefcake."

He walks through with his palms surrendered. "Don't _even_ have one on me."

Ruth rearranges the beige handkerchiefs on his table's ceramic plates. "You sure?"

" _Positive_." Flynn sits down and scoots up to the ivory Baroque table. "Been off the bottle for years."

"You smell like you've been bathing in alcohol."

He frowns and smells his lapel.

"Just look alive, Beefcake." Ruth looks behind them. "The fan dancers will be here soon."

"Anyone in specific?" Flynn looks where she's looking. His VIP room is connected to an antechamber by an ogee arch with tied curtains. This has always made things less than private, because that same antechamber leads to another family of VIP rooms. Ironically, those have doors. The extra space did often have a live jazz band from New Orleans to make up for it, though.

"Your trick reserved Autumn and Candy White. You want a Colored with that?"

"Am I ordering fries or _people_ , Ruth?"

"Don't be an activist. All you see are barbecued drumsticks when you look at women's thighs. The Colored would be from France, so she's temporary."

"Fine." He doesn't feel like arguing about branches of prejudice tonight. "Add whomever you want."

She lays a fat one on his temple. "Be nice to your waitress, got it?"

"I'm always nice, Sugar Plum," he tells her as she switches those hips toward the exit.

" _Nice_ , Rider. Not _friendly_."

Flynn scrutinizes her footsteps until he's certain that Little Miss Woodtease won't be coming back. While worming his arms out of his sleeves, he serves the antechamber some long overdue attention. The gasps on the other side of one door are owned by a woman, and her duet partner is a lucky, out-of-shape bastard who sounds more winded than she. Stripteases, foreplay, and dirty talk usually get him harder than intercourse, but right now, Flynn is feening for the same shot of anesthesia that those two are having.

He needs to clear all the sunflowers out of his head and numb his childhood paper cuts while he's at it. Alas, here he sits in this grandiose dinner room, doomed to spend an hour or three with Eugene's fungus. There is no high-speed chase to put him in _go,_ no vodka bottle to tongue, no listener to spar words with, no woman to lick down, and no damsel to emancipate. He has to deal with himself, and he hates being dealt with unless it results in an orgasm.

"Would you like something hard to start with?"

He jumps.

The pudgy waitress who asked such an innocent question is currently trying to hide her blush behind her notepad. "Sorry, sir. I made the suggestion because you looked..."

"Like I needed something hard." He sighs, averting his face. "Yeah, I'll _bet_."

She chews on her pen's top, making pockmarks. "Our _Blackthorn_ is a favorite."

"Darling, to be perfectly honest, I need to make a better effort to stay on my toes tonight."

"How about _Death in the Afternoon_? _"_

"...Nooot _quite_ my idea of better. I'm thinking maybe a diluted beverage _without_ an ominous connotation."

"The _Aviator_?"

"Sounds delightful!"

After she explains what's in it, she fetches it. After he drinks it, he wishes he never had. His lips stay glued to the glass as they slurp the gunpowder out of that chest-burner until his jugular is exploding with hellfire. His body loves the way the tonic cremates him ― how it makes him see unicorns, princesses, and dragons while the world waves him good riddens ― but his common sense wants him to chuck it. That's the problem with alcohol, though: it's "unputdownable."

Saxophones and trumpets start up in the antechamber. They're butchering one of Louis Armstrong's hits ― "Basin Street Blues" or something ― and doing a friggin epic job of it. A gazillion minutes later, this tiny prick of heartburn expands between his airbags, creating a hot zone around his toes.

 _'Uh-oh.'_

Something is off.

Flynn has no idea when the fan dancers come in, or if they begin dancing at all, but he pulls away from his chair before anyone can grind their cakes against his sausage. "'Cuse me for just _one_ moment, ladies." The philanderer takes one last drag on the glass and then stumbles up onto his feet, toddling past the three ― are they women? ― frogs at the table. If his eyes aren't confused, then his body is confused.

Light but heavy confused.

Up but down confused.

Hot but cold confused.

What in the world did he just chug? All those dreamy _feel-good's_ that usually came with live cremation have mutated into piranhas lunching on his liver. This was supposed to make him better, not _hospitalized!_

Flynn waddles into the antechamber to find the can. His watery eyesight becomes a wormhole leading him down a long, ripply tunnel toward a destination that looks light years away. What a black comedy ― here there was all this upbeat _groove music_ bringing the whole house down while his organs are having hemorrhages. _'P-Perfect.'_ He uses his sleeve to wipe his eyes before squinting at the band.

Their bodies morph into weird shapes.

 _'Holy...'_

The jazzers aren't people anymore. They're demons. _His_ demons. Skeletons dressed in bow ties with tongueless smiles and eyeless sockets, strumming the strings of their basses with skinless fingers. Their cobra growls chant, _"Lady killer."_

Flynn blocks them out with his hand and grips the antique vanity table behind him, pulling himself over a rosewater bowl. His pants tighten into hiccups, his hiccups sputter into chuckles, and his chuckles melt into snivels.

What did he have to drink to make himself numb? Whom did he have to sleep with? Which God did he have to pray to? Where did Satan want him to behead a chicken? What reverend did he need to phone?

Flynn frantically splashes his face with water and rubs it into his pores, puffing it out of his mouth. He presses a hand against the clammy mirror and then swipes it clear. A zombie is demisted to him. _He_ has the glowing skin of an apricot, the luscious hair of Jesus, and eyes the color of a sunset, but the corpse in the mirror does not. His leathery countenance is snared in a fishnet of lanky hair strands, and his eyeballs are so inflamed that they look bloated with blood.

Petrified, Flynn prepares himself to dunk his head back underwater before he hears a door closing. Heels click behind him in the distance. Goosebumps climb up the escalator of his spine in suspense. A tall, blurry smear of red, white, and yellow enters the corner of the mirror. It dazzles and glimmers like a disco ball made of rubies, just as though someone had pinned it there on purpose.

It is an apparition he wants ― a ghost he fears ― an angel he needs ― and he breathes her in like he's inhaling stove gas: "...Rapunzel...?"

In the heart of the smear, blossoming in the face of white, are two turquoise eyes. Fuzzy contours begin to melt into clear shapes now. He can see hourglass hips, white shoulder blades, greasy cleavage, rouge lips, platinum curls, and hurricanes in eyes that are as turquoise as the Caribbean Sea.

His pupil arrests more light. _'Elsa...'_

Her fog-ball of a body trembles and pulsates, coming closer, it seems, to the mirror that she's looking into on the other side of the antechamber. He still can't see her clearly, but his retinas can feel her movements. They can feel her raising her hand to wipe the mascara under her eye with all four fingers. They can feel the red strap on that paper-thin dress gliding down her arm like a rose petal sticking to the oil on her skin, leaving her porcelain shoulder graphically nude.

His hand touches his dripping goatee before touching the mirror. His fingers skid down the reflection as they splay over her diamante body, making a foggy claw print on the glass. The red, white, and yellow blur slowly walk away from his closing fist to disappear into a different room.

"W...W-Wait..." he whimpers to the vision.

Her blurry form leaves his shoulder like a falling star in the reflection.

"Come _back_..." The cage in his brain shrinks. " _Please_ ―" His foot hits the metal leg of the table. " _Guh-ho!_ "

―Pain.  
―Knife-sharp.  
―Up his thigh.  
―In his stomach.

" _Mrrrmm_..." It tears through his corpuscles. Makes him sink down onto his butt. Sit, sit, sit, sit. Breathe. In, now out.

His optical wormhole fades into a bicycle wheel of colors, and he half-consciously realizes that he's sitting up against the door frame of his VIP room. "Can..."―he blubbers helplessly―"some...body... _help_ me?"

"Somebody" starts laughing behind one of the closed doors in the antechamber. "Somebody" starts applauding and hollering, _"Bravo!"_ However, the demons and frogs in his VIP section are nowhere to be found.

"R―uth?"

Nope.

"Él―Éloïse...?"

Nada.

"A―Anybody?" Not too long ago, he mattered to these people. He had mattered enough to be purchased, kissed, and fondled. Now, he's invisible. A slug sliding down a wall.

 _'Why does this keep happening in all of twenty-four hours?'_ He tries bending his leg to get up and out.

Nothing happens.

 _'...Huh?'_ He tries wiggling his toes.

Nothing.

 _'Wh-Wha...'_ He tries moving his arm.

Still nothing.

His entire weight is in his head like he has no body at all. _'I'm...'_ This has to be a joke. _'I'm ― I'm numb...'_

Boots brush against his thigh. Someone is stepping over his lap. Over _him_. His eyeballs ache from the pressure of trying to look up over his eyebrows and see his ignorer. The figure's glowing scalp stands in front of the chandelier, but unlike the _Angel of Light_ , there is no churchy nimbus haloing them.

He blinks against his tears as a cloudy face hunkers down.

In the heart of the smear, blossoming in the face of white, are two olive eyes. "Do you _always_ have to make things more complicated than they need to be, Fitzherbert?"

Hope drops down his throat's chimney like ashes. Fuzzy contours begin to melt into clear shapes now. He can see fox-red hair, mouse ears, triangular eyebrows, freckles canopying a swordfish nose, a crooked smirk, and black holes in the eyes. Black hole eyes exhibiting such strong gravitational pulls that nothing — including him — can escape them.

"No one should have to go to these lengths to sit an old friend down for dinner, now should they? It's a repulsive example of disgraceful manners on your part."

With the weird impression that the ocean is the chandelier and the sky is the floor, his vision diffuses like water. His eyelids sink until he's slipping into a sea of unconsciousness, and, with a sound like cymbals, he visualizes two princesses in the combers, dancing across the suds with bare feet and snow, gay with freedom.


	5. ༺(Shaved Fish)༻

_"Not all poison was bitter. Some of the deadliest poisons in the world tasted sweet; they were that much more dangerous because of it."_ **― Nenia Campbell**

* * *

"Euuugeeene~..."

The black lids of an oval hole peel apart.

' _...Ra-p-punzel?'_

Air bubbles float up to a chandelier of underwater sunlight.

 _'...Where...am I...?'_

Yellow schools of fish swim through the fingers of kelp.

 _'Am I..._ _a-at the bottom of the marina's harbor...?!'_

Drifting up towards the chandelier of underwater sunlight is a sunflower sandal that breaks through the foamy surface.

 _'_ _...I-I was murdered, w-wasn't I...?'_

The sandal bobs against the tide's pulls and backflows.

 _'But then...why does this...feel so―'_

Long, woolly ropes of hair snake over his nostrils. He can hear gravity burbling in his ears as he twists his neck in the dense nebula. His suspended hair blocks the face of another body floating beside him. When his strands slither away, he comes nose to nose with a nude corpse. He lets out a bubbling holler as he blanches, thrashes, and then retracts, clamping his hand over his mouth to steal back the oxygen.

The girl's endless maze of yellow hair surrounds her like a dragon. Both sets of purple eyelids and green lips are calcified shut. Her veiny breasts are wearing cigarette burns. A slab of flesh dangles from her scalp like a wavering cloth of skin, showing decayed meat that had been peeled back around her skull. Eugene's pupils breathe in the image as he hyperventilates behind his palm.

Someone's gloved hand plunges into the water and bites his shoulder, yanking him upwards.

―"GUH!" Eugene's eyes explode open. With his cheeks ballooned, he flings his wringing-wet body over an anonymous arm and opens his mouth to vomit into a silver pail.

His rescuer's silk glove pets his bangs off his temples while he retches. The upchuck perseveres for fifteen minutes until the last drops of puke leak off his teeth. Tears star Eugene's throbbing eyelashes as his lungs contract from the nightmare his mind is putting on loop: a maze of yellow hair; purple eyelids and green lips calcified shut; cigarette burns where nipples should be.

 _'Rapunzel...'_

Oh, Rapunzel.

"Now I'm going to lean you back."

Identifying this stranger's voice is the furthest trouble from his head. Rays bleed into his hypersensitive retinas as he feels his back slump against a chair. His bag of bones own no will to move because his brain is sloshing around his skull like unpackaged turkey meat. "...M'sorry, R'punzel..." Salty tears sting his ears. "...M'so s-s-sorry..."

Eugene's vertigo subsides in half the time it takes for his smothered sobs to let him breathe, but then it dawns on him like daybreak that the ceiling light is the chandelier of his VIP room, not an underwater sun. _'W-Wha...?'_

"Your distress is completely understandable, but we still need to keep your head back in order to stop the bleeding." The warm vibration in his ear is as deep, smooth, and rich as a chocolate-shelled cherry stuffed with syrup. "Everything below your waist is numb, but your hands should be mobile at this point."

 _'Bl-Bleed-ing?'_ Something runny and thick zigzags between the gaps in his teeth. He swallows the hot sodium flavor before feeling his flaccid lips with his fingers. When he lowers them, he finds yet another nightmare. Dilated pupils panic down on the big red stars that are exploded across the fate lines in his palm. He can now feel blood in his nostrils.

Eugene lifts a shaking hand to touch them, but a glove shoves the hand away and presses a handkerchief against his nose.

"Lean your head _back,_ Eugene." It is done for him by a fist gripping the scruff of his scalp.

Eugene's brown eyelash flaps against the heat of a lit match.

"Good," congratulates the holder. "Pupil response is a bit slow, but still normal. You should be fine, then."

Glass jingles and breaks somewhere behind him.

"Please, Mrs. White ― there's no need to be alarmed." The flame is waved out. "He just had a little too much to drink. Why don't you go and get the waitress?"

"Y―Yes, sir..."

Trembling, Eugene hears himself inhale sharply as the stranger slips an arm under his head and heaves his back off the chair. He pierces his lip with his teeth to quell the sob of pain bubbling up from his throat. His body feels comparable to a stone and a feather.

"Now just take it one breath at a time."

Eugene holds his breath. The man's tone is different. Bad different. What had originally sounded like a warm, cinnamony voice oozes into a sinister drawl:

"Because you'll be needing every—last—one."

Eugene turns paler when a familiar cloud hunkers down beside him. In the heart of the smear, blossoming in the face of white, are two olive eyes. Images come rushing back like a tsunami ― fox-red hair, mouse ears, triangular eyebrows, freckles canopying a swordfish nose, a crooked smirk, and black holes for eyes. Black holes exhibiting such strong gravitational pulls that nothing — including him — can escape them.

"Erik made a small... _miscalculation_. He wasn't told to add that much powder, though I suppose accidents can happen when you're asking Weselton's ogres to get the job done."

Sweat is gummed to the back of Eugene's neck. "...H―...H-H-Hans?" He doesn't want to move his lips past that name. He wants the air to drop dead.

"Nice _guess._ " The bridge of a silk finger catches the tear worming down Eugene's cheek just before it hits his knee. "I take it that you were expecting someone _else,_ however?" An added thumb smears the streak across Eugene's face, stretching the elasticity of his skin.

Eugene can only make noises of terror, but he can't make his lower body move.

"Believe it or not, I didn't plan on dining with you like this."

Eugene clamps his eyes shut, but still sees the blood-red labyrinth of his brain. _'Get **up**! Wh-Why can't I get **up** —'_

"After all..." Chuckling without opening his mouth, Hans uses the support of his knees to stand up. "I would never do anything to _intentionally_ harm you, Eugene, but you have an awfully bad habit of running away, and I find that rather _disappointing_."

The chair across from Eugene soughs.

"But couldn't you have executed this one with better...'finesse'? Your evasion, I mean." Hans puts his hands on the armrests and lolls back, balancing his ankle on his knee like he's sitting on some undeserved throne. "Because I get the feeling that you underestimated how much I missed our little friendship. Blood brothers to the end, aren't we?"

Eugene doesn't speak. He _can't_ speak. His jaw is operable, but the sagging right side of his mouth has no feeling.

"Now, then..." Hans optimistically opens his menu after tonguing his thumb. "What would you like for this special reunion? Moules Marinières? Blanquette de Veau? Soupe à L'oignon? —That one has _excellent_ reviews, by the way," he footnotes with the sultry lower of his voice. "Sole Meunière? ...No? Hmm." Hans pensively peruses their options. "Then how _about..." —_ he smiles up at Eugene—"Piperade?"

Eugene grants him nothing. He sits there cryingly, with both cheeks shiny from perspiration, and his nose covered by the bloody handkerchief Hans had given him. The latter man sets his chin in his palm to smirk lazily at him. Eugene's shivery little body appeared so breakable, like that of a wet kitten in a sewer. All who have known _Flynn Rider_ would agree that the career criminal is built out of cliches and women's love thoughts, an unsolvable (pi x bullshit) equation who hides behind smirks to keep others from seeing the real him, but now Hans has trapped the kitty cat, shaven his fur down to the pink, bleeding flesh of _Eugene_ , and he derives great pleasure from seeing that raw flesh.

"...You're right. No Piperade," Hans declares. "That's always been too hard on your stomach."

The waitress who'd sent the _Aviator_ makes a giddy pop-up from the swaying curtains.

"There she is," Hans presages, leaning back to fold his hands on the table. "It's... _Maria_ , isn't it?" He pretends to be dopey and charming as she nods. "How's business tonight, Maria?"

Eugene watches the snake beam and talk to her like he isn't sitting there across from him half-dead. The smiling profile of Hans's face makes him want to smash it with a flower vase. He's never had such violent cravings before — not since the betrayal of the Stabbingtons — but Hans needs a good braining for this shitty stunt. He needs to be chopped up and packaged into a trunk.

The waitress shoots Eugene a five-second glance. Positively addlepated, she bends down to Hans's level to ask for clarification. "Is he—"

"Horribly impolite," Hans chuckles between the syllables, smiling in pseudo-confusion at his date. He bathes the girl in the warmth of his apologetic grin as he tilts towards her to murmur, " _I'm_ sorry. Please don't hold my friend's impropriety against him. He can't help it, you see. His mother was a prostitute who abandoned him with a pedophile, so he's had no one to pick up any manners from."

"..."

"Now would you be so kind as to get us the 'Seafood Paella?' He likes those."

Blinking excessively, the raddled girl turns around and tears between the curtains like a knife.

Hans shouts to the swinging drapes, "Oh, and — please let Mrs. Autumn and Mrs. White know that one dance should be fine."

The ceaseless bleeding that stains Eugene's suit ceases, but his numbness and rage do not.

"Ah," Hans pipes. "I suppose this is them."

Two silhouettes walk behind the transparent paper-sheet doors that sit opposite to the table.

"You've never had impressive tastes in women," Hans contemns as one fan-dancer peels off her bra to let her breasts flop down onto her ribs.

A starfish-shaped bowl of seafood and rice is placed down between the men in the meantime.

Hans is the first and only to comment on the preparation. "Now, doesn't that look spectacular?" He goes on to make a plate for both of them, which gives Eugene more of a reason to abstain from eating.

"You should eat while I'm feeling generous," Hans warns. "The only way to bring down your nausea is to eat."

Spit dangles from Eugene's lopsided mouth as he stares at him semi-consciously. "Wha' was'h it...?" His lips flap to the words.

"You'll have to speak up." Hans holds his shrimp down with a fork to saw through the throat with his knife. Juice squirts from the headless neck. "I didn't take a language course in gibberish."

"Tha' Mickey..."

"I'm sorry?" Hans teases.

"Tha' _date rape_ drug'ck you spiked m'drink with...wha' was'h it?"

"Oh...that." Hans blows aganst the steaming shrimp. "It was an 'anesthesia,'" he mocks.

Eugene's tonsils hurt. He gulps, and a burning prick of pain swallows his esophagus. "An' Éloïse...?"

"Hmph." Hans combs through his rice as he chews up his shellfish's spine. "I didn't need to do anything to Éloïse d'Orléans, Eugene. She was a participant, not a sacrifice."

Tears swarm Eugene's eyes again. His batting eyelashes can't stop them now. "...How l-long am I...g-gonna b-be like this...?" he whimpers.

Hans, whose mind has always been what Eugene used to call a slaughterhouse, keeps his generic smile glued on his cheeks. "I estimate four hours max."

Eugene wants to stab him in the balls. " _Four_ hours?!"

"That's right, so in the meantime, you should start telling me about all the wonderful things you've been up to for the past year. Traveling the world in search of your better self, I presume? Or maybe you were repenting to a Hindu priest in Indonesia. I hear that healing and peace can only come from solitude, but I doubt anyone's taken the time to ask about your experience caringly."

Eugene's glare burns with hate — the kind of hate that makes one's eyes red because they're unable to stop the hot tears from sliding down their nose.

"It's perfectly fine if you don't want to tell me or anyone else for that matter. I understand the idea of privacy being a man's last means of freedom." Hans pats his chin clean with his handkerchief. "I will say that I'm curious about your mental health after what my brothers told me over the phone in Bloodsworth Correctional Facility. To play such a large part in a girl's murder is one thing, but to lose possession of a tiara—"

"What'd you _want_ , for _shit's_ sake?" Threads of saliva that have mixed with his tears fly from Eugene's mouth.

"Do you recall when we were children?" Hans makes a U-turn. "Father took my brothers and I to your brothel home as a rite of passage." He dips his pointer inside his wineglass and rubs it all the way around the rim, coaxing the crystal to sing heavenly warbles. "But I was much more intrigued by the little Peter Pan who was passing out washcloths to Father and his whore."

Eugene's eyes widened as a rerun of their childhood aired in his head with staticky audio:

 _—_ _"Are you really just gonna sit there while they fool around in front of you?"_

 _—_ _"Father told me to."_

 _—_ _"And you're actually gonna do what you're told?"_

 _—_ _"_ _I don't fraternize with the Help, so if you'd be so kind as to leave me alone, I'd be eternally grateful."_

 _—_ _"That's ironic, because all your face screams is 'help.' And what're you wearing gloves for, sport? It's a gazillion degrees out!"_

 _—_ _"I told you to leave me **alone**!"_

 _—_ _"Geeze Louise, alright already! You rich princes are all the same, you know that? Uptight, snotty, and no fun."_

Those whiny, half-innocent voices die in the muddy trenches of Eugene's memory bittersweetly.

"I've never been called a prince before," Hans confesses, warm in the face from his own revisitation. " _'But why is he the only boy in the whorehouse?'_ I wondered. _'And why is he humming and gallivanting about like he's somewhere better than this?'_ Little did I know that he had a makeshift Neverland called, "The Tales of Flynnigan Rider." Father would give him candy, but he was only interested in the diamond watch on his wrist, the one that my dead mother had given him on his birthday. _'It looks like pirate treasure,'_ you said. I found it..."—Hans raises his eyes to Eugene's—"...charming."

Eugene's head twitches as he tries to muster up enough strength to turn it in an effort to avoid Hans's gaze, but his body is still nerveless.

"I then asked the boy to steal it just so I could see my father cry. After that, we conducted a slew of con games against my family and its cunt-struck colleagues like naughty children. Those heists only got bigger as we got older."

Had he been in a wisecracking mood, Eugene would've mentioned, _"You omitted the part about you watching from a stairwell while Madam Beatrice 'man-handled' me and my 'boy parts.'"_

"When he climbed the ranks," Hans rambles on, "I introduced him to Weselton's circle, and found him two-timing me as a partner—"

—"Jus' tell me wha' you _want_?" Eugene gurgles, the mere act of sharing oxygen making him furious.

"You." Hans smiles at him with the preying eye of a Siamese staring at a cricket. "And nothing but."

"Wha...?" Eugene shudders at the implications. "Because o' wha...?"

"Because you're a remarkable package — a whore and a thief rolled into one. There are all kinds of ways to put you to use." Hans's chuckle thuds in his chest. He sits back and crosses his legs with his wine cradled in one hand, smirking wider. "Additionally, you _owe_ me. For that reason alone, I've found a job for you."

"Get in line," Eugene croaks, fighting off an unexplainable onslaught of dizziness.

"I was always first in it." The arriviste swirls the liquid in his wineglass. "There are plans to be arranged for my lovely wife that I think you'll be interested in being a part of." Hans's face turns into a smudged blur of faint lines.

 _'Oh, come on...! Not th-this again...'_ Eugene can't keep his eyes open. He watches himself black out just before Hans purrs:

"Had you stayed in Weselton's office a little longer, you would've had the privilege of being told by myself that Jean d'Orléans's private bidder was her."


	6. ༺(Back in the Saddle Again)༻

*** A/N: **_This update almost didn't happen because I don't know if anyone is reading. If you're interested in seeing where this goes (once I remember the plot, because I deleted my outline, so even this chapter here is a major derailment), please do let me know. If not, it's probably best that I don't spread myself so thin._

* * *

―Pain.  
―Knife-sharp.  
―Up his thigh.  
―In his stomach.

"..." Flynn's eyes explode open. With his cheeks ballooned, he opens his mouth to vomit into a red vase. The upchuck perseveres for sixty seconds until the last drops of puke leak off his lip. "G-Guh..." He raises his head with his wet eyelashes pinched together. "Wha tha' hell..."―cough―"was..."―cough―"that bastard"―spit―"doing at my happy hour...?!"

Rider's muzzy mind can hardly rehash the nightmare of Weselton's henchmen dragging him out of Velvet's back doors, Hans towing him into the back of a car, streetlights passing over his face, and stars moving above him as he was carried outside again. No part of his brain wants to rehash it, either. It seems perfectly acceptable ― necessary for his sanity, even ― to believe that none of these events have actually happened. To prove as much, his ghost is not lifting his decapitated head off the floor of Hans's manor, and cushioning his knees are the suede pillows of what must be his schooner's saloon. The cawing dawn streams through his windows with a vibrancy that supports his unscarred reality.

The mystery that Flynn can't unravel is how he limped back to the marina without his face between his French flame's legs. He moans a requiem for the memory of her sweet, dripping tenderloins. _'I could certainly use a dose of Éloïse d'Orléans right about now...'_

Worse still, after seeing the hallucinations he saw in Velvet―

 _He lets out a bubbling holler as he blanches, thrashes, and then retracts, clamping his hand over his mouth to steal back the oxygen._

―he's arrived to the conclusion that he needs to wean off the alcohol. Flynn sits up from his cushions with a banging hangover that's been increased by his rancid body odor. A sharp tug on his wrist stops him from taking care of either. None too thrilled to find the culprit, he looks down slowly. What he finds is a shiny pair of handcuffs that have him chained to the leg of a pink leopard couch. "... _Ho_ no...! No, no, no, no, no!" He yanks and rattles the manacles to no avail.

Helpless, the caught cat tries to clue into his whereabouts. Pink wallpaper and French lamps inform him that he is trapped inside the living room of a rococo home. How he mistook this nauseating decor for his man cave escapes him, but the only escape he needs to focus on is his own. "...Okay, _breathe_. Just breathe! You're h'okay; you're fine. There's nothing to worry about. These are probably the relics of a wild night with an overenthusiastic rich girl who's―..." His sentence turns tail and never returns when he sees a familiar bastard opening the pink double doors.

"About time," Hans bitches, not even glancing his way as he preens his villain outfit. "I thought you'd never wake up. But what in the _Devil_ is that _rancid_ odor?"

Flynn almost pisses on himself. The scariest part about this demon's pop-up is his appearance: he's rocking grey pants instead of cream ones, and the pink shirt under his blue waistcoat is half-buttoned.

 _'Oh. Oh, hell no.'_ Flynn is about to be sick all over again. "D...D-D-Did we just...?!"

"I'm sure your head game is impressive," Hans drawls, moving to the mirror on the wall to rake his fingers through his fringes, "but I don't intend on being the one flexing your jaw."

Flynn wishes Hans had killed him before he raped his ears with, "head game." A second visitor emerges from the vestibule, this one being a woman. No amount of clothing could hide her gender. The thick hips and juggantic breasts stretching her pink peignoir give her a rubenesque beauty that offsets her long neck and elvish face. Had he not been in a life-or-death situation, he would've taken more time to savor her loveliness by licking her dry.

The gorgeous redhead sits down next to him, checking out his body with her beryl blue eyes. To his dismay, she doesn't gaze upon him with lust or adoration. This is proven by her pulling out a diamond lorgnette to rate the quality of his complexion. "A beautiful specimen, Westergaard..."―she glances at the vase before forcing a smirk that thinly laces her disgust―"in spite of his _conditions_ , that is." Her big bottom leaves dimples in the couch after she rises. "However did you let him get away?"

"He's rather like trying to catch a fox during hunting season: always manages to avoid the hounds unless you shoot him."

The woman's laugh shows her tonsils. "I can only _imagine_ ―"

" _I_ hate to interrupt this _lovely_ conversation," Flynn chimes in, "but could one of you kindly explain to me what'n the world is _going ON_?!"

The busty deity turns to him with her hands folded in front of her. " _My_ name is Sawyer Appleton, Mr. Rider."

"You don't say!"

"I've been seeking a man of your reputation for a very long time," she explains with the maternal look of a nanny. "It isn't very often that a Don Juan can brag about thawing the hearts of politicians' widows, especially a wife of the Duke of Guise. After you've been scrubbed down, fed, and hydrated, I'll give you a walkthrough on what to expect in our order of business." With that, she faces Hans to hand him what Flynn believes to be an exchange for his services.

Flynn snaps out of his _what-the-fuck_ daze. "WOAH, woah, woah, WOAH! _Sweetheart_ , what on EARTH do you mean by order of b―"

Hans cuts him off: "Ms. Appleton?"

She already has her palm on the door knob, but she looks back to blink her pretty eyes at him anyway. "Yes, Mr. Westergaard?"

"Rider already has a woman who would be interested in him, so I was hoping you'd be able to reserve him for her. It's a surprise."

"RESERVE me?! Just who the hell do you think you―"

"Has she visited me before?"

"She has, indeed. Her name was once Gothel Baldoni."

Sawyer's shoulders and breasts bounce from laughter. "He's certainly my old friend's type," she teases. "I'll see to it, then." A parting smile is kited Flynn's way. "Goodbye, Mr. Rider."

After his new madam shuts her tacky doors, Flynn finally growls at his smiling seller: " _ **What**_...in the HELL...did you just _**do**_?"

"Hmph." Hans drops the key to Flynn's handcuffs as he goes back to loving himself in the mirror, not at all looking behind him to see where the jingler fell, which happens to be a too-far-away-distance from where Flynn is cuffed. "Take off your clothes in the bathroom to your left. You need to look decent for my wife's stepmother if you want to be formally introduced. She likes to pick her teeth with call boys in the sex tourism business whenever she travels."

"Why, you little―"

"She desperately wants arm candy for Arendelle's opening night, so I promised her yesterday that I had a present she wouldn't be able to turn down. "

Cracking Hans's skull with a flower vase was now an available option. "When I get my hands around your neck―"

" _You're_ going to tell Gothel that you're affiliated with Versailles along with the lie that you are twenty-four. Do not discuss your old relationship with Weselton. Do not take her to your favorite cabaret. Lars owns it now, and he was rather upset about us causing such a ruckus last night. Most importantly, do not stare at my frigid wife when you are in front of Gothel. She'll grow talons and use them on both of you―"

"Listen up, you psychotic little maggot! You can't just barge back into my life, force me to sit through some half-assed date rape, sell me off to a bougie sex company, and then tell me to get spruced up for your cougar-in-law!"

"I don't recall you having a choice."

Flynn's blood turns into cement.

Hans narrows his eyes at him from the mirror, and Flynn is definitely sure that he sees hellfire in them. "Where would you go that I wouldn't find this time?" His glossy lips are drawn into a smirk. "I can make it harder for you to hide than you _ever_ thought possible."

Grunting, Flynn clenches his teeth. "Don't count on it," he bluffs.

"Is _that_ what you want?" Hans folds his hands behind his back. "A lifetime of running over a lifetime of being rested and alone?"

Cold sweat drizzles down Flynn's throat as he lets these horrific threats sink in.

"It's just sex, Eugene," Hans chuckles. "Sex, and a little something _better_ , if we play our cards right. This escort service is just a cover. Gothel would never take you into her home or put you on Elsa's account if you were a freelancing vagabond. You may cooperate with me or fight me every step of the way. It makes no difference to me."

"..." Flynn presses two fingertips against the gap between his eyebrows. "... _Wait_ , wait, wait, wait, waitwaitwait. Park in reverse for a second here. Did _I_ just hear you saaay...?"

"You did. Elsa's account is going to be of many endowments you'll be granted on the job I'm offering you."

Something in the way Hans says this makes it impossible for Flynn to trust his angle.

"It'll be your last commission, Eugene," Hans assures. "After this, you can be alone."

"...Did it you _ever_ occur to you that you could have just...ohhh, _I_ don't _know_...―sent me a _TELEGRAM?!"_ Flynn reaches for the vomit-filled vase to chuck it at Hans's back, but he can't lift it. "I would've ― _nrgh_ "―the vase clatters after he reluctantly puts it down―" _thought_ about it!"

Hans's expression is bright with amusement. "We fell out rather badly."

"So drugging me repairs our fallout? _That's_ the logic of the year!"

"It was either drugging you to keep you still, or allowing Weselton's ogres to break your legs. I promised him one or the other in exchange for keeping you in my custody." Hans walks towards Flynn while slipping on his gloves. "And, in the end, I chose _not_ to harm you. It would've brought me great pain to harm you."

"Oh _sure,_ because the person who just poisoned me would care about my health―"

"Oh, but I _do_ care about you, Eugene." Hans stands over him with a creepy look on his face. "You're one of the few people I care _about_."

"Puh _-lease_ stop calling me that."

"It's your _name_ , isn't it?"

While participating in this ridiculous pissing contest, Flynn pokes the key on the floor with his toe. "My name is _Flynn Rider_."

" _I_ prefer Eugene. _You_ should embrace it, too."

"Says the man who won't touch anything without gloves on."

"..." Hans's smirk drips off his cheeks.

"Ahhh HA!" Flynn snatches up his savior. "Gotcha!"

His captor snatches it away.

" _Hey,_ you _asshole―_ "

Hans yanks Flynn towards him by squeezing his face. "Why don't you start with your pants first?" He tosses the key in the air and then catches it in his palm, smiling. "You can do _that_ with one hand."

* * *

 _―Puuuuurrrrrl―_

"Were you always so.. _.monstrous_ , Mr. Rider?"

"Well, what can I say? I suppose I had the, uh, _angels_ smiling down on me when I was born."

Giggles ricochet off pink tiles.

The sequel to Hans's charade isn't nearly as humiliating as Flynn dreaded. Except for the drugging, kidnapping, sex trafficking, and being forced to shimmy out of his boy shorts in an empty pink living room, he has to admit that he takes little issue with the royal treatment Sawyer's female employees are giving him. Sophia has bathed, manicured, and exfoliated him in a bathroom with cupid motifs grinning down on his sudsy scalp from the tiled walls. He incrementally learned from Isabella that he won't be required to tenant the agency's tenements for potential tricks. Nestled between the breasts of lily-white suburbia, Versaillian gigolos and courtesans have the choice to live off-campus compared to the harlots Flynn waited on as a guppy.

"Sawyer takes swell care of us, even the Coloreds," Isabella chitters as she spoons applesauce into Flynn's maw. The nineteen year old is a cute mulatto from some forgettable place overseas, and unlike the other Mona Lisas on Sawyer's staff, she has the merriness of a lamb who enjoys befriending the escorts she scrubs. Flynn admires the way her honey curls bring out the caramel in her skin just as handsomely as her brown eyes do. "You'll fit in fine here. All charm and good talk? Why, you'll be the cynosure of Versailles."

Flynn wants to tell her that he won't be staying for long, but he can't bring himself to dim the twinkle in those big brown eyes. He adjacently hopes that Versailles is treating her as well as she trumpets. No Colored ever receives genuine kindness anywhere in the world, much less a bather. He feels inclined to take the silverware from her when she swoops in for another spooning, but Sawyer kills their innocent time together by strutting into Flynn's suite to assess his equipment. His robe drops to his quivering ankles at her behest after Isabella and Sophia leave them in peace.

Pleased with his girth, length, and color, Sawyer explains to Flynn how mandatory it is for him to stay hairless and sweet by maintaining a high fructose diet. Evidently, no client wants a mouthful of yeasty, throat-burning Clorox, but no trick of his ever complained about excessive sodium, so he's good to go. "Clean" is not on Sawyer's proviso list because patriarchy has long brainwashed the public into believing that call girls are to blame for STDs, not men or "honest" women. Gigolos can't possibly contract anything from "dowagers, manless ladies, spinsters, and widows" under this sexist ideology. There's a diagram of other rules in the red book Sawyer hands him, but he's too focused on his next stumbling block to page through it.

"How long has it been since you last had intercourse, Mr. Rider?" Sawyer bluntly inquires.

What a morning. "Um... _heh_...I'd have to say...ppprobablyyy sssince yeeesterrrday evening, perhaps? Definitely yesterday evening, without a doubt." The truth will kill his resurrected career, which should be seen as a swell thing if this didn't also mean the assassination of his ego. No notorious playboy wants to confide in a beautiful woman about their equipment's... _desuetude._

Sawyer, unfortunately, is not just any beautiful woman. She keys into his hesitation and smiles sympathetically at the answer it brings her. "Well, then..." The madam places her paperwork on the sofa table. "We have a screen test on our hands."

Flynn's brain can't breathe. "...A screen―...sorry? I, I, I ― _ahem_ ― I didn't, I didn't properly _digest_ that the first time around."

"I said we're going to have a screen test."

"Mmmm-kaaaay, but what do you mean by _screen_ test, exactly? Because I _completely_ skimmed past that crucial little detail on my application."

"Your performance is a reflection on Versailles, Mr. Rider. If your adequacy has been compromised by your retirement―"

"Ah, ah! My good woman, "compromised" is absolutely _not_ , in my vocabulary. Now excellence, on the other hand, is _still_ internationally known to be my middle moniker."

Sawyer looks unconvinced.

"But if it's proof that you _want_ ," Flynn starts untying his robe again, "then it is _proof_ that you shall have." Putting on airs may or may not have been enough to snow Sawyer. The mood, if not the entire situation, is unromantic and unsexy, making it impossible for him to step into character. He'll have to fake it till her orgasm makes it. Luckily, the seascape of her naked body helps him concentrate.

"Sheathe yourself with one of our condoms over there, if you'd be so kind." Sawyer drapes her silk nightgown over her chair. "But no kissing and the like, if you'd be even kinder." She scoots to the center of Flynn's panel bed and unpins her updo, attractively loosening her prim image without losing her sophisticated tenue. The pale body she cedes to him looks to have the softness of a marshmallow.

"Why?" Flynn weakly asks. Though better looking inside her brassiere, her unbelievably large headlights have a realistic droop that puts his cynical assumptions to bed. He's an avid fan of smaller busts with higher posture, but Sawyer is such a rare hybrid between sonsy and dainty that he can't close his mouth. If only things were different between them...

"I'd rather get straight to the point."

"Really?" Flynn knows this has nothing to do with his vomit ending up in her vase ― not when she saw him gargle peroxide eighty times in the last two hours. "But, what pray tell is sex without foreplay?" he offers, trying to entice her to bend towards a lane of sex that he still excels in.

"So you're that type of man, then." Sawyer stretches out on her back and parts her legs, rubbing the red curl above her scalp as she smiles sleepily at him. "No wonder sexless women lose their heads for you. You must have millions of them rolling out of your mailbox each morning."

Responding takes a few seconds because he's distracted by how charming she looks. As he crawls onto the bed to meet her, Flynn keeps his eyes on hers. He bends his face down between her thighs until his breath can hit her flower like a knife. " _All_ women like me," he murmurs, eyes still caressing hers. His wet lips peck her mown mound. "Not _just_ the deprived."

"What's your idea of sex?" Sawyer whispers in reaction to his tongue skating up her navel.

Flynn's tongue slides between her breasts before disappearing behind his smirking lips. "Body oil." Feverish kisses pepper her abdomen as he migrates south again. "Scented candles." Two fingers are used to gently scissor her love button. "Rose petals."

Her hips start moving in a circle. " _Romance..."_

Flynn squeezes a generous amount of coconut oil into his palm. "I like to call it, "Holy Worship."" He positions his fingers to give her a healthy dose of Venus Butterfly action.

Sawyer gasps. "I should―...have you know―...that no man―...has ever pleased me before," she says in a tight voice. "I'm loveless."

"Is _that_ right?"

The state of her body forty minutes later begs to differ:

―"Please take it out...!"

Flynn sighs in disappointment, having loved the way her orgasms hurricaned his skeleton as she came over and over again. He had been hitting her spot from the back with deep, steady strokes, and by no means did he want it to ever end, but Sawyer is due for a blackout from her seizures. He pulls out slowly. The woman can gush.

Flynn flops down beside her while she gasps for air with her face in his pillow. "How's that?" he asks, breathless from edging. He didn't come even when he was in the clear, though he hopes she can lend a hand or two after her pulse has stabilized.

"Unbelievable," Sawyer sighs, notably not in disappointment. She flips her webby hair off her face. When she sits up on her knees, Flynn takes it as her getting ready to fill his lap with her massive mammaries, but what she does instead is slide off his bed.

"Um." He's hesitant to bring attention to the painfully obvious. "Aren't you forgetting something on my end? _Lit_ -ter-rally!"

Sawyer gives him her back as she flings her robe on without stepping into her nightgown. "I'm sorry, Mr. Rider," she pants, "but I don't have more time to spare." A pink towel is dragged off the lamp table to dry her thighs. "My meeting is in thirty minutes, and Hans wants you returned to him in fifteen." Her voice sounds truly apologetic.

"B-But it's not like it'll take a whole _hour_ ," Flynn chuckles impatiently, unsure of how long it will take. He can't put his finger on why he didn't unload on cue. The blocked climax makes him feel like he has a pebble stuck in the middle of his canal, and the feeling is long past being uncomfortable. He just wants her to sandwich his baby-maker between her baby-feeders so he can soak her with his gratitude.

"I really am sorry about this, Mr. Rider." Holding her stringy wet hair behind her ear, Sawyer pecks his cheek before smiling sadly at him. "You truly are a nonpareil."

He doesn't remember what she or he said before she deserted him in the pink suite. All he can think about is how hideous the bathroom's wallpaper looks as he stands over its pink toilet. "Why do I always end up with the short end of the stick?" he groans. Choking the chicken with globs of oil doesn't do much, so he switches his fantasies from making love to Sawyer's meaty cleavage to kissing Elsa's flushed face. _'Pan down a bit,'_ he tells his head in an effort to keep Eugene's rage capped.

Flynn focuses on the cinematic image of bouncing breasts and sweat running down her innie while she rides him like a cowgirl. _'That's it.'_ Her breathless rasps leave his throat tighter than his glutes. _'H'God, that's **it**.'_

Elsa peaks in his lap with a smile plastered on her pink cheeks and her hands gripping the top of her hair. That smile is enough to make him let go. Spent and shaking for the first time in months, Flynn promises to break baby girl off as his revenge against her husband.

* * *

"She'll know who you are," Hans cautions while he modifies the wings of Flynn's collar in the backseat of his Rolls-Royce Phantom. "Gabby women have passed you around their Goldwater circle for years, after all." He moves his hands down to Flynn's red tie. "Sex tourism is a rather rocky career choice, I'd say, so I understand why Weselton's side order of business was so tempting to you. If you act right tonight, Gothel will consider making you herkept man." Hans licks a thumb and reaches for Flynn's unruly fringe.

Flynn blocks his thumb with his elbow. "I **don't** want to be _kept,_ " he growls. "I'm not some canary to be confined in a _cage_." He considers groping the Royce for an object to spear Hans in the eyeball with, but now that he's sitting in front of the asshole like an equal, his plan falls back on other ways to circumcise Hans's manhood without getting a bullet wedged in his skull. He'd be a fool to walk away from new opportunities. He just wishes that he could play connect the dots with Hans's face one good time.

"Hmph! No need to be _feisty_ ," Hans insists after changing his snobby sneer to a cat's smirk. "You're a free spirit who refuses to belong to anyone except the 'wind and sky.' I respect that."

"Look, don't overegg the pudding. I'm not in the mood for Shakespeare." Flynn is having a hard time tying his tie by himself. He isn't new to wearing them, but there's usually a woman around to put them on for him.

Hans uses the intermission to admire the scoundrel's aesthetic appeal in his new smart wear. Flynn's striped pants are held up by striped suspenders that match his checkered tie, copper belt, and alligator shoes. The dress shirt underneath accentuates his broad chest and toned biceps equally well.

"Very agreeable." The look that Hans gives Flynn is in one way or another overtly similar to the look he gave him when they were children. "Anyone could mistake you for a gentleman."

"Oh. Oh, that's _real_ cute." Flynn cranes his neck to squint at the rear view mirror.

Erik, who happens to be the driver, glares back at him from the reflection. Flynn gulps. The sinsterness of his circumstances injects a shot of anxiety into his muscles again.

"I was speaking with the _utmost_ sincerity."

Flynn finishes putting the tail through the loop with trembling hands. "I'll bet you were." The more he contemplates his new "life," the more he wants to cry (and had he known that one of Hans's brothers bought the cabaret, he wouldn't have gone), but crying can wait till after payday.

Hans reclines against his leather seat to cross his legs, sit his hat on his knee, and palm back his russet hair with the éclat of a prince.

 _'Bastard.'_

"Take us to my lovely wife's estate," Hans orders. "We're already late."

The automobile roars.

"Now, what is it that you want me to do with these lionesses once I get my foot in the den?" Flynn sits as far away from Hans as possible by disguising his discomfort as nonchalance when he leans against his windowpane. "Embezzle thousands of dollars from what I assume to be their joint account? Steal a family heirloom from your wife's collection? Crack a combination lock hidden behind the wall of a secret passage?"

"You've always been quick on your feet," Hans congratulates, "but this goes far deeper than _that_." The Dano looks outside to watch carob trees fly by. "Tonight, I want you to seduce Gothel and keep an eye on my wife's activities. If you can conquer and colonize Gothel, then we can go from there."

" _Let_ me ask you a question: do _I_ look like the CIA to you? Because if not, then babysit your _own_ wife."

Hans's gloved finger taps his hat restlessly. "I won't be able to stay around long enough to shadow her every step, especially not with her Charybdis of a mother choreographing them."

"So there's a party kicking off tonight that I have to cheese for. Just my mood." Flynn can't say it won't give him the opportunity to get Elsa alone, so he doesn't bicker with Hans there, but he still has contingency plans. "Look, I need more details about my marks before I start conning the matriach out of her gypsy skirt. First and foremost, what role does Medusa play in the money department? Is it all her or is it both ladies?"

" _Gothel_ is responsible for managing Elsa's trust fund and assets until she turns twenty-one, but she overspends in Elsa's name."

"Aren't there any laws that keep trustees from abusing inheritance money?"

"Your thinking is logical, but such logic has never been mandatory. A trustee can draw from the trust fund and do whatever they see fit with it, especially if permitted in writing. There would have been nothing stopping Gothel from saying that everything she purchases is for Elsa's benefit or upon Elsa's request even without her father's stupidity. Elsa allows that harpy to walk all over her because he allowed the same. She's the voiceless prisoner of her own parents."

Flynn's heart twists a bit, but he tries to cover up his confusing feelings with a joke, "Talk about ambition. Fireworks must've shot out of Gothel's―"

"There _is_ a part of Elsa's inheritance that Gothel can not abuse due to primogeniture," Hans says firmly, beheading Flynn's sexual remark, "but this also won't be available to Elsa until her twenty-first birthday, so it's frozen in time. Haakon VII of Norway cut the women off without a care in the world after her father died, and Elsa's main ducal house is under siege in Germany. Arendelle supplies a joint venture between Gothel and my brothers to guarantee that Gothel has an extra security blanket."

Flynn doesn't like the tune of that for several reasons. "Then it sounds to me like the French parure's private bidder was Gothel, not your ironbound wife. Mind explaining that suggestio falsi to me?"

"It was more of a suppressio veri," Hans minimizes. "After all, the bid was still placed under Elsa's name."

"Oh, for crying out loud! Just admit that you misleadingly threw out Elsa's 'involvement' to get my attention."

" _Your_ attention?" Hans feints obliviousness. "I had no idea you were so interested in _Elsa_ ," he teases, dragging out her name with his deep voice.

Flynn plays up the shallow card: "I find it highly improbable that you don't know your rich wife is my type."

"Then in light of that, I would suggest keeping her off your conquest list." It's difficult to reckon whether Hans's caveat is a threat against his gullet or a warning for his own benefit, but the unabashed show of annoyance causes Flynn's horns to curl mischievously. "Your target tonight is Gothel, not Elsa. I'll show you how to handle her separately."

"Then in light of _that_ , why don't you give me a little more backstory on your part in this circus show, such as how exactly you slithered your way into a crown jewel's lap of luxury?"

"Is it _really_ that hard for you to wrap your pretty little head around?"

"'Course _not._ Legions of men are courting princesses into a delusional happily ever after after five seconds of knowing them."

"That's 'cute,' but not quite how it happened."

"Then _educate me_."

"Jealous, are we?"

"Would you just cough it up already?"

"Then if you just _must_ know, since you're obviously dehydrated, Elsa was... _payment_ for an old debt Gothel had incurred from her dealings with my father," Hans synopsizes. "She was what I like to call, "preferable―'"

"Of _course_ she was _preferable_ ," Flynn raves. "The woman is a retirement plan! Her blood sample is worth millions, and she can fill her own pillowcase with stacks of moolah."

"Which is why I like to think of it as a marriage of convenience," Hans finishes crossly. "The popularity Elsa's profession endows her with helps me access the circles she attracts."

Flynn's foot wiggles. "...Circles, huh?"

From a balcony view, their union actually isn't unfathomable. Betting tracks, gaming facilities, black markets, ponzi schemes, drug rings, sex trafficking, brothels, and criminal enterprises form the Westergaard family's wealth management, and it's all protected under the armpit of corrupt governors. The ex-head of Hans's household, otherwise known as his abusive father, had been an adviser for Denmark's Secretary of State in his better days, but he apparently hit the road after his name made headlines over embezzlement rumors and crown jewel thefts that may or may not have been proven. Whatever the turnout, the guy found his calling in Goldwater by gaining control of its coastal underworld, fist-pumping with influential tycoons, and letting his eldest sons manage the belly of Outteridge's harlotry before his funeral.

"What kinda circles are we talking here?"

"Powerful ones," Hans plumes. He rests his elbow on the window's casing to relax his cheek against his knuckles.

To Flynn, the redhead's involvement with Elsa now makes sense. Hans handles the family's investments under the thumb of his brothers, but he lives at the bottom of the food chain socially, publicly, and financially. Frankly speaking, he's invisible. His only way of steamrollering his worth into the public eye was to "marry out" and ride someone else's coat tail. Nabbing a sparkly trophy like Elsa might've actually compelled his brothers to respect him.

"Sounds like she really gets the dogs barking," Flynn praises. "Is that what she was doing in the cabaret last night? Helping you climb the ranks?"

Hans fires him a sidelong frown. "What're you whimpering about?"

"I heard your little foot stool. Saw her, too. But I knew it wasn't you who was giving her the orgasm of her life. After all, "omnipotent, supreme beings" don't succumb to distractions like sex, and _that's_ why I didn't expect you to show up at Velvet. You think places like those are completely beneath you."

In all Flynn's years of crossing Prince Hamlet at Weaselton's banquets, Hans demonstrated the patterns of a cerebral narcissist who demonized women and dismissed lady-struck men such as his brothers. Sex by itself is one of many "degrading indulgences" to him. The guy believes that the body's needs are inconveniences to the mind and lauds asexuality as an example of one's superiority to the "barbarians of mankind." His obsession with denying himself the basic pleasures of human contact extends to his obsession with wearing gloves, which provide an external barrier between himself and people.

Discrepantly, Hans's flourishing relationship with masturbation, which is rumored to be mechanical in nature, was outed by his brothers, so Flynn always thought he was just a Claude Frollo who lied to himself about his needs. He does wonder if Hans's father did more than subject Hans to voyeurism in the brothels Papa Westergaard funded when they were boys.

"But I knew Velvet wasn't beneath _you_." The side of Hans's mouth smiles against his knuckles. "Still and all, what you say is true. My own brothers don't seem to know me as well as you do." He places his hand on Flynn's leg. "You'd be the perfect candidate to speak at my open casket."

"Lay off!" Flynn thwacks his hand, thoroughly grossed out. "Are you pimping out your own wife or not?"

"Stop _whining,"_ Hans nearly laughs. _"_ As intelligent as you brag to be, even _you_ have to think that what you're suggesting is too lewd for my character to arrange."

"Oh, please." Flynn knows it isn't beyond Hans to profit from prostitution as long as he has no part in the sticky-fingered activities. How poor little Elsa tolerates his misogyny ― as well as his paranoid tendency to see women as threats to his "power" ― is an even greater unsolved riddle.

"I hope you've completed your detective work," Hans announces, "because we're here."

"...What? Already?!" Flynn grips the front seat and leans over Erik's shoulder to see.

Hans grabs the back of his pants to seat him before Erik can rearrange Flynn's face. "Can you _please_ find it in your right mind to conduct yourself like a proper gentleman?!"

"What're you, blind?! How are you not salivating?!" Flynn excitedly rolls down his window. "Lookit that! Just look at it!"

Their vehicle wheels up in front of a Victorian cast-iron entrance that reminds Flynn of London's Buckingham Palace gates. Two security guards drag them open for the Royce's ingress. Flynn sticks his head out of the car to overdose on the splendor they're entering. Elsa's eyegasmic residence smacks of neo-classical architecture integrated with Greek Ionic colonnades and Palladian windows. The marble water fountain greeting them on the gravel turnaround is shouldered by angels and gargoyles.

Flynn can hardly wobble out of the car without fainting. If Gothel is overspending, then that milf is overspending well. Francis and Erik are told to stay behind because dogs aren't allowed in the house (not really, but it's fun to tell himself that). The more refined duo cavorts their way up to the portico. Hans tugs the bell pull and then holds his hat in front of his groin, pasting on the bright-eyed smile of the Gingerbread Man.

Flynn rolls his eyes at his vomit-inducing expression before toying with his tie.

His blackmailer shoots him a look loaded with bullets. "Stop fiddling with yourself."

"I can't help it," Flynn whines. "I'm nervous."

The butler opens one door. He dispenses a civil smile to Hans, but performs a double-take when he sees Flynn. The latter waves his fingertips sheepishly.

"He's an old friend," Hans illuminates, obviously embarrassed to claim him.

"Of course, sir..." The Nordic manservant tentatively welcomes them in.

Flynn drools over the foyer they walk into. Elsa's imperial staircase, Corinthian pilasters, and filigree hand railings are positively lucullan. The four-tier chandelier that crowns the two-story high ceiling hangs like an upside down skyscraper made of crystals. Flynn doesn't have half a mind to look at anything else. He isn't sure if he's strolling into a palace or an opera house, but he's about to marry it.

"Her Grace was in the dining room the last she summoned me," imparts the butler.

"And my wife?" Hans questions.

"I believe Her Highness is in her bedroom."

"I see. How disappointing for us." Hans milks his sadness by briefly glancing at Flynn in order to get the man to join his stage act, but Flynn only reciprocates the look with a flat stare. Hans clears his throat and says to Kai, "Is there ever any hope of prying her out of that room when there isn't a party going on, Kai?"

"I'm afraid not, sir."

"It's just as well, I suppose." Hans pulls his hat behind his tailbone with both hands, wagging it anxiously. "Would it be possible for me to see Mother Gothel presently? I imagine that she's rather busy with overseeing the arrangements for this evening, but I'd like to introduce her to my companion before her guests arrive."

"Please wait here."

Flynn hears Kai retreat; he can only assume that he's out of the foyer because he's still worshiping the blessing around him.

"Hold this." Hans angrily holds his hat out for Flynn to take. "And don't touch anything while I'm gone."

"What...? Where're _you_ going?"

"I'll be back shortly." Hans ascends the staircase.

Flynn sticks out his bottom lip before bitterly perching the hat on his own head. "But he didn't say that I couldn't poke around, now did he?"


	7. ༺(I Saw Her Standing There)༻

Emboldened by his divine right to do as he so pleases, Flynn meanders around antique garniture to rank the worth of Gothel's darlings. Hans may milk him to get what he wants for now, but he'll be finessing Hans to skife _everything_ he wants before the deal closes. One discovery that bespells Flynn is the lineup of regalia laureling Gothel's plinths in her carpeted corridor. He can tell by their exotic designs that they were auctioned off by collapsed empires. Paintings of Prince Agnarr of Sverre and Schleswig-Holstein nailed above the plinths reveal him to be a detached man with a dark cloud over his brow.

Princess Elsa's photographs exhibit the same joyless demeanor from ages eight to seventeen, but her sophisticated beauty even from childhood is exceptional. In due course, Flynn's tour ushers him into a hallway guarded by Trojan warrior statues. The troublemaker chuckles at the motionless watchmen before ducking under one of their spears. He inches closer to the nose of the hallway―

"Have you decided on your presentation yet?"

"...!" Flynn jogs in reverse to take cover behind Prince Hector's shoulder. Popping his head out little by little, he triple-blinks at a neoclassical armchair inside the hall's drawing room. His pupils zoom in on the sitter's crossed legs.

Black stockings match the black evening glove holding a rubied cigarette holder between two fingers. The mistress, whose shadow takes the shape of an inhuman creature against the floor, must be none other than Mother Gothel. "Valuable names from Oslo Palace will be here tonight," she purrs from where she lazes in the darkest corner of the room. "Prince Olav V and his familiars have been placed at the top of my guest list right alongside Prince Angelo, Clark Gable, and Fritz Kuhn, so I expect you to put on something radiant; something... _divine_."

Flynn's cogwheels begin turning under his skullcap.

The bottom of Gothel's cigarette holder is lifted to her scarlet lips. She sucks in the smoke and blows it out through her nostrils. "You certainly can't forget about the expectations of that Naziphile, Alphonse Müller. He positively _lives_ for your performances."

"I'm tired," objects a throatier voice that sounds dulcet, docile, and drained. "My legs are sore from my rehearsals for Arendelle, so I thought it would be best if I didn't perform tonight."

"... _Do_ you now?"

There is something not quite right about the way Her Grace says this, something evil under the filigree. Her mellow mood negates it, but Flynn has a terrible inkling that Gothel is about to decapitate her defier.

"You'll be dis―sa―pointing a _lot_ of people," Gothel tweets, elevating her voice to a creepy height.

"With all due respect," her hoarser interlocutor demurs, "I feel that I would disappoint them more by executing a less than perfect performance."

"Hmph. Is that so?" Gothel uncrosses her legs and drops her cigarette holder into an empty vase. Gloved palms push off the chair's armrests.

Flynn stretches his neck past the door frame for curiosity's sake. Mantling Gothel's shoulders are soft waves that imitate a Gene Tierney coiffure, which is a favorite of his on women next to French braids. The profile of her keen features is the only scenery he can binge on from the angle he is given, yet he doesn't need a front view to determine that her build is plumper than what she has been broadsiding Goldwater's streets with. To cap it all off, her buxom bod rocks a burgundy gown that is two sizes too small for her, and if there is any way to make a woman's figure unattractive, it is usually that unfashionable offense.

" _You're_ right," Gothel yields to her victim. " _After_ all, _Elsa_ knows _best_."

A monkey wrench is thrown between Flynn's cogwheels. "EL-sa?" he mouths, desperate to make sense of the preconceived notions he'd been warehousing. The Elsa in his mind was a seductress with a sultry tongue despite her misgivings, not this soft-spoken jellyfish.

 _―"She's the voiceless prisoner of her own parents."_

Perhaps Hans is right about this, if nothing else.

"...That wasn't what I meant―"

"Come now, don't be _absurd,_ " Gothel continues to speak in a sing-song cadence as she glides into the open with pendulous hips. Her fanny could stop traffic. "You said it yourself, didn't you? You think it would be _best_ if you didn't perform tonight."

Flynn cants to get a better shot of the scene. The knockout snatches some part of Elsa's face that he can't see beyond the flower vase.

"A face like yours can't afford to be shattered on a marble floor, so I'll be flexible by allowing you to have your way _this_ time...under _one_ condition." The cinnamony tone Gothel's voice dips into is enough to fascinate any detective, yet her decrescendo climbs back into its baby-talking croon just as abruptly. " _But_ , we can save all _that_ for another chat. Now then, why don't you be a good little stepdaughter and go tend to the aviary for Mummy?"

Flynn listens to the music of Elsa's heels. Upset at having lucked out on getting a glimpse of Her Highness, he edges out further to steal one. His eyes catch the dancing pleats of her blue dress at the very last second―

"Oh, and El- _sa_ ," Gothel chirps.

The pleats stop swaying after Elsa's heels stop moving. Flynn watches her calves rotate until her knees are facing Gothel's direction. He braces his manhood for the kisser of a sex pot ― a real succubus to send him over the precipice ― but what he gets is a baby-faced angel who resembles bucktooth Rapunzel far less than her photograph let on. Her lips are thinner, adopting a graceful shape that distances itself from Rapunzel's clumsy mouth. Her nose is upturned yet pointy, sitting closer to her pink bowstring of an upper lip.

The wide blue eyes stand farther apart than Rapunzel's, curving upwards at the wings to announce the maturity in her gaze. Her jaw is ladylike, as is her tall neck. Bangs as blonde as sunlit snow are backcombed into feathers that curl at the ends, bespeaking sophistication. Her tidy mane is pulled into a rose bun with a diamond hair clip holding it in place. The physique underneath her modest blue dress has all the right proportions of a beauty in full bloom.

There is not one iota of childishness or unkemptness about her. She is a woman. Flynn had no idea that Elsa would be this majestic. Photography and paintings have done her little justice. In motion, the carriage she totes is the kind of carriage that persuades a man to focus on all of her rather than parts of her.

Even a mafia boss would be heartened to take off his hat and peck Elsa's knuckles before stuttering his first word to her. Like a true princess, she is genuinely breathtaking by way of her hyperfemininity quickening Flynn's pulse in place of her hypersexuality slipping under his waistband. His heart sighs at his new prospects. Then astoundment cartwheels into confusion. This conservative mouth-wetter, with her angelic bearing and butterfly sleeves, is not the same sexpot who flaunted her daisy-stem waist, bellflower hips, and C-cup bust in a skintight dress at Velvet.

Those turquoise dazzlers of hers, however, encase the same legendary sadness. Hans's lie is starting to lose its crutches, and now Flynn's temper is starting to blow its lid. For what reason must he be lied to about his marks? Does Hans overestimate his conscience?

Gothel's complaint draws him back into her duologue with the breathtaker: "Don't forget to thank Müller _properly_ this evening. He's done more than enough to make us comfortable here."

Flynn winces at the information.

"I won't, Mother. I'll make sure he receives my gratitude," Elsa promises, never making eye contact with her stepmother so much as she does with her white oxfords.

"Wonderful. Now off you go."

Elsa pats the back of her bun as she goes. The perky shape of her derriere can be seen through her thin dress. As Flynn is biting his knuckle, someone's fist suddenly grabs the back of his collar and jerks him against the chest of a sturdy assailant.

"WH―"

Stifling his holler, the gloved hand snaps his head around to make him meet Hans's burning eyes.

" _Mm_!"

The latter man pushes the former away to make a point of his anger and rectify his own tie.

"Oh, and your worthless husband is most likely waiting for you in the foyer," Gothel yells.

Hans exploits this diss by floating into the drawing room like he has just emerged from a sunny walk in the park. "I hope you can forgive me for arriving later than expected, Mother."

Sweating bullets from the scuffle before, Flynn creeps as far as the door frame to time his own entrance.

Gothel was in the middle of rearranging chess pieces when, beady-eyed and jaw-slacked, she looked up at her unexpected visitor. "... _Hans_!" She accidentally drops her queen before setting her back in her rightful place. "What a ― wonderful _surprise_ ," she lies while nervously rubbing her thighs. "I...didn't think Kai would let you in here without confiding in me first." The cougar's apprehension evaporates into fake elation once Hans reaches her. "But I'm so _happy_ to _see_ you."

"And I you, Mother."

Gothel holds his forearms to peck both cheeks with the side of her mouth, dramatizing each smack with a, "Mwah!" The third snog is preluded by her holding his chin between her fingers and crushing her lips against his.

Flynn's jaw hits the floor. Gothel's enthusiastic moaning is more along the lines of an over-affectionate aunt's, but it is impossible not to read pseudo-incest in this kiss.

Her chomper smacks off Hans's to curl into a smirk as she scrubs lipstick off his mouth with her thumb. "I've _missed_ you so," she cooes like a mother coddling her infant.

Hans hides his mouth behind his handkerchief to either vomit or wipe the lipstick himself.

"Have you decided to take me up on my offer yet?"

"No, I've ― not quite."

Gothel raises her chin and suggestively heaves her eyebrow. "And why not? Is the task too large for a man of your rank? Or does it wound your pride to share your sponsor with my own consumers?" Before Hans can talk, her eyes open wider to glare at the man in her doorway with dilated pupils. " _You_ there!" she roars. "What's your _business_ here?!"

Flynn presses his heels together like a toy soldier. "UH! W-Weeeell, um―"

" _Please_ ― don't be _frightened_ , Mother. He's just a gigolo from Madam Sawyer's stockpile," Hans explains sheepishly.

Gothel looks at Hans and scoffs. "A _what_ from _whom_?"

"Your old acquaintance. I thought it would please you to have an escort accompany you to the grand opening of Arendelle, so I took it upon myself to find the best in Goldwater's boutique. Please think of him as a present from one family member to another."

Gothel steps back and crosses her arms, only unfolding one to pick up her cigarette holder. " _Really_?" she drones. In conjunction with looking Flynn up and down, her protruding hip and lackluster reception indicates that she is far from impressed by Hans's generosity.

On the receiving end, Flynn is far from unimpressed. Now that they're face to face, he's over and beyond transfixed by her finery. Her burgundy gown is extravagantly complemented by a bib of rubies on her yummy cleavage. He is almost positive that the necklace belongs to one of many 18th century British duchesses.

"Shouldn't there be a contract for me to sort out first?" she protests. "Because if there isn't, then I'll have to ring up Sawyer to make sure he's the real deal all by myself, and I don't have time for such nonsense."

"I've had it all sorted on your behalf," Hans swears. "Whatever concerns, requirements, or restrictions Flynn has can be discussed between you two in private."

"Hmph. Alright, then do "we two" a favor by excusing yourself from the room."

Hans looks dumbstruck by Gothel's curtness.

"Elsa is in the aviary," she indifferently tips off, scooting his presence away with her hand. "I'm sure she'll want to see your face."

Insulted, Hans walks to the double doors on the opposite side of the room.

"State your name, dear," Gothel tells Flynn in boredom.

Her offhanded response to his very existence is completely alien to him. "I'm...um..."

"Flynn Rider," Hans adds grumpily while leaving. "He once serviced Governor Ashworth's dowager, the Prime Minister of Poland's divorcee, and lastly, the wife of the Duke of Guise."

"Is that _so_?" The sparkle in Gothel's pupil gleams. " _Well_ , then...I suppose I could...invest _some_ interest."

 _'Got 'er.'_

"Make sure you close the doors after yourself, Westergaard."

Hans wraps his fingers around the knobs of two doors and exchanges worried glances with Eugene before pulling them shut.

Gothel slinks over to a leather ottoman and sits down, sighing. "I neither have the time nor the energy to give you a proper interrogation or work out some kind of _oral_ negotiation,"―she straightens her skirt prior to recrossing her legs―"so I'll start with level one questions."

Flynn waits in the center of the room with Hans's hat in both hands, blinking owlishly.

Gothel drapes her wrist over her knee and smirks at him, rolling the toe of her heeled foot. "Why don't you come a little closer, dear? I can't see you from way over there."

He hesitates.

"Don't worry; I don't bite."

Flynn edges closer.

" _That's_ a good boy." Gothel's hand reaches down into an umbrella bin beside her. "Now let me see your face." She hoists his chin with the crest of a jeweled cane and turns his jaw to appraise him. "Mm...you're a fine piece of merchandise, aren't you?" The edge of her mouth stretches her smile line into a triangle.

Her Grace's wrinkles have plenty in common with mud cracks up close. She also sports those villainous laugh lines between her lips and cheeks, but there is something bewitching about her strengths, such as the glossy curls spilling over her sandwiched breasts, or the long eyelashes feathering her sensual eyes. That remarkable body of hers had him hung up on their bright future together between the sheets. Gothel was that gorgeous witch in every fable who drank virgin blood to retain her beauty, and it is natural, if not equally horrific, to grow rock hard from ogling such a Jezebel.

"So I've been told once or twice," Flynn chuckles. "C-Critically-acclaimed, you might say." He's never wary of cougars, but every sperm cell in his sac is warning him to be cautious around this one's temperament despite his attraction to her.

"So I've heard. Your name gained quite a bit of mileage in Goldwater. How old are you, exactly? Twenty-five?" Her deep cleavage looks like it runs on for miles when she bends down to thumb off her black heels.

"Twenty-e...―four. I'm twenty-four."

"And you were brought up under Madam Beatrice's wing, isn't that right? She debuted you as one of the first three gigolos in her brothel, but you broke out and paved your own way. Rumor has it that you left it all behind for reasons unknown, so what on Earth could possibly bring you to _my_ doorstep?"

"The, um... _unpopularity_ of my ilk put a damper on my lifestyle when the economy went stale, but Goldwater's trade has improved exponentially since Outteridge boomed back up. The demands of sex tourism in the past were a little too overwhelming to stay afloat in, anyway."

"Aw-huh. And, what makes you think _mine_ won't be?"

He tries on a little more confidence: "Pleasing the needs of every underappreciated woman on this side of the country has never been an issue for me, Your Grace."

Gothel smiles and lowers her cane. "Then we'll just have to see about that, now won't we?" The cane is dropped back into the bin. "Tell me what you don't do."

"Well, for starters, threesomes with other men or transsexuals are off the map. Scat, extreme BDSM, consensual rape, "water sports," algolagnia, and erotic asphyxiation are also a no-can-do. Blood drinking, vomit fetishes, fart fetishes, armpit fetishes, menophilia, licking eyeball fetishes, diaper fetishism, piquerism―"

"I think I got the _gist_ , Mr. Rider," Gothel grunts. Her fingers unbuckle his belt.

"Woah-ho!" Flynn squeezes her wrist. "Shouldn't we...erm, c...c-c-cuddle first?"

Anger sits on her voice. "I need to see a sample of what I'll be receiving before I even _consider_ "cuddling" with any part of you. Now don't be _shy_." Gothel softens her approach by massaging and crushing the tent in his pants, narrowing her eyes at him provocatively. "Just be a good little accessory and let me take a peek at your value. I promise you won't regret it."

"Uh...heh!" Flynn gulps. "I don't plan on it."

"I'll bet."

Had she been touching him in a different way, he would've kicked his feet up and relaxed the back of his head against his hands, but this type of physical exam is invasive and depowering for several reasons. He slides his wrist across his sweaty forehead, trying to push back his reservations as she unzips his fly.

Gothel's spidery fingers worm inside the slit until her fist is rummaging around for the end of his flagpole. When she discovers that the buried treasure is pressed against the entire length of his thigh, her face lights up. " _There_ he is," she celebrates. "Long and _throbbing_." Gothel applies more pressure to her grip, murmuring with the undertone of some condescending caretaker speaking to a naughty boy, "Have you been hiding your yearning from Mummy all this time? _Shame_ on you."

Flynn chuckles before sighing at the tightness of her choke-hold. He tries to whisper a lie about how badly he wants her to punish him, but his heart is beating too fast for speech.

"Let's give him some air, shall we? Poor thing has been positively _suffocating_."

Flynn holds his breath behind his tongue as more and more of his glory sees daylight until it springs free from his fly.

Gothel is wowed by the trophy between her eyes. "My, my, _my_. Well endowed, aren't you?" "Well, well, well." She looks up at him with an arched eyebrow. "Well endowed, aren't you? I see what the craze was all about."

"What...can I say? Th-the angels were...s-smiling...down on me when I was born," Flynn spits in a strained breath, having to endure the experimental pinches she gives his sensitive tip.

"Hn." Gothel's velvet palm pumps him. " _Very_ nice. It doesn't take long to get you worked up for immediate use." She licks her lips. "What other samples can I _**squeeze**_ out of you?" Her merciless constriction fries his brain until the cogwheels start sparking.

Cross-eyed and malfunctioning, Flynn bites his moan back as his stomach ties itself into a shoelace.

" _Don't_ keep me waiting, Rider. You're _supposed_ to be trained to climax when I _tell_ you."

He forces his body to comply.

" _That's_ it. Just let it aaalll out..." Gothel tastes him. "Not _bad_."

Yet, there is still no orgasm to be felt, just a pod of tingles akin to what he feels when he lifts a toilet seat to do his business. Something is terribly wrong with this scenario. If it isn't the scenario, then it's either him, or her. Flynn's damp eyes fly open when he feels a tissue box being shoved into his fist.

"Now clean yourself up and take care of the rest on your own," Gothel demands, discarding him as though nothing has happened. She snatches up her wineglass to wash down her previous cocktail. "You can find the bathroom down the hall to your left."

Confounded by what has just transpired, Flynn turns around to shakily wipe what she neglected. Normally, some kind of romance takes place to create a buildup of suspense between himself and the client. Flynn's existence survives on robbing from the cupboards of a woman's heart and maintaining control, but Gothel has treated him like an expendable object ― like the way a man would treat a woman ― and if there is one thing that he can't stand, it's being expendable.

"You have my permission to enjoy yourself tonight at my party, Rider," she tells his hunched back, "but stick close to your companion's side. Until I see how you act, I won't be claiming you in public as my date."

Now he isn't sure if he'll enjoy being her boy toy.


	8. ༺(When I Take My Sugar to Tea)༻

There is something to be said about a man whose head encastles two minds as a means to cope with the traumas that have lorded his life choices. Kleenexing his flaccid manhood in Gothel's marble bathroom makes for a very embarrassing addition, though embarrassment is not the only lesion holing his brain. As he sizes up his reflection, an odd thing happens to his sanity. Memories from his boyhood begin to play out in the mirror like a sepia-toned motion picture.

Inside this motion picture sits a young Madam Beatrice, who is perched on her sleigh bed. Standing before her is the six year old orphan who made a shilling off waitering in her brothel for prostitutes and their tricks.

 _"Strip,"_ Madam Beatrice tells the child, smushing her bent cigar against a bronze tray.

Perplexed, the boy pulls his pants down to his ankles.

Beatrice's white teeth peer through her scarlet lips like seeds in a fruit. _"That's a good boy."_

―"WAH-HO- _HO!_ " The viewer's reflection throws his hands open. "HOLD it _**right**_ there!"

The film pauses. It is at this chilling moment that the viewer realizes said reflection does not belong to _him_ , per se.

The man who is undoubtedly "Flynn Rider" in the mirror glares at the man who is unfortunately Eugene Fitzherbert staring back. "Just what on _Earth_ do you think you're doing?"

Eugene is too thunderstruck to answer his other self rationally. "... _What_?"

"Explain to me _how_ exactly this little field-trip down memory lane helps us on our mission to leave Goldwater in Never-again-land? Because _I'm_ having trouble on this end of your cerebrum."

"... _How're_ you―"

"Look, Fitzherbert, the _past_ is in the _past_ , so _leave_ it in the _past~_!" Flynn, who is in color, circles the frozen bodies of Madam Beatrice and six-year-old Eugene, who are now in greyscale. "We're trying to secure our _future_ here! If you mess up our _whole_ future just because of some lousy sob story from the olden days,"―he stabs his thumb in the direction of Madam Beatrice and orphan Eugene―"then we'll _never_ get another shot at oaring oceans away from this warped society for an island to call our very own. You already threw us off the scent _last_ time by feeling sorry for _Blondie_ , and I―will―be― _damned,_ if I allow that to happen again."

"...B-But―"

" _Don't,_ "but" me. Just do as I tell you to, and it'll allll work out. Now I want you to let me go back out there so I can keep our chins up and finish as many lickjobs as I need to in order to bring us one step closer to our happily ever after. Oh, and, the next time you see Princess Elsa... _don't_ see Blondie. See... _dollar signs_. See those _legs_. See you, her, tangled bed sheets, and Prince Hans getting everything he deserves. Capisce?"

A knock kneecaps the conversation, scissoring off Eugene's concentration.

"Mr. Westergaard is waiting for you, Mr. Rider," Kai relays.

Kai's receiver covers his face and shakes his head, only lowering his hand to sneer at the mirror. He stands up straight and reknots his tie. "You _really_ give me more trouble than you're worth, y'know that, Fitzherbert?"

* * *

"Welcome to the residence of Her Highness, Princess Elsa of Sverre and Schleswig-Holstein!"

" _Jesus_ Christ." Flynn plumbs his ear canal with his pinkie. "Talk about a healthy set of _pipes_..."

And so the night is born. Ear-splitting intro by Kai aside, Gothel's soi-disant "housewarming party" parrots more of a red carpet event for the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria than a gala for friends and their iniquities. Guards have picketed her lawn, paparazzi cameras are flashing behind her gates, celebrities are waving to other starlets from her fountain, indoor musicians are performing Fred Astaire's "Cheek to Cheek" underneath aerial dancers, and dames to die for are slapping the shoulders of their dates as they laugh at tasteless things only rich people can laugh at. To the left of the garden mingles a sickening amount of Naziphiles from the German American Bund. They are recognizable to Flynn not by any "Hail Hitler" accouterments but by underground notoriety alone.

Their attendance makes little difference to him, for his eyes are too busy reflecting the bijouterie in the backyard. "Check out all the _honey_ s. This shindig is a whole entire _feeding_ ground," Flynn squeals, losing his damn mind. His pants are on fire from the constellation of diamonds winking at him among the dessert towers.

Not one nymphet of high repute is present without some flasher on her body part to glamorize her worth. Knowing that he can have his pick of the litter is roughly enough to make Flynn optimistic about his elevation into purple society.

"More like a trust fund eater. Gothel continues to spend well beyond her common sense," Hans grouches behind the shelter of his champagne glass. Devil horns well pomaded and poise just the same, he stands togged up in a red double breasted dinner jacket that has enough swank to give David Niven a run for his cab.

Flynn is no less fine, having traded his striped pants and checkered tie for a white, thigh-high coat from the trunk of Hans's car. His black tie, square shoulders, and rose boutonnière make him feel like Cary Grant in Big Brown Eyes. Dressed to the teeth as they are, both men have chosen to isolate their conversation to an unpeopled balcony. Flynn would've cannonballed into the sea of mermaids if he had been a free shark without an iron ball chained to his ankle. The headache hasn't stopped him from maintaining eye-sex with the womenfolk on the patio when all has been said and done.

"How do you like her?" Hans asks at an anti-climatic point in Flynn's lovemaking.

"Which one?" Flynn says around the sugar beignet his molars are sinking into. "The b'unette or the red'ead?"

" _Gothel_."

"Ah." Flynn gulps down a lump of dough. "Shhheee's... _how_ do I put this?"

"Witchlike?"

"I believe the adjective I'm looking for is **_terrifying_**."

"No doubt," Hans seconds, "but it's _your_ job to declaw her."

Flynn scoffs, "I'm a _love_ doctor, not a veterinarian. She's more likely to use me as some sort of scratching post." He pats his mouth with a handkerchief. "I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Westergaard, but your cougar is deficient in oxytocin."

Hans drawls, " _Elsa_ is the one who's deficient in oxytocin. Gothel is just a burned harpy." He sips his bubbly.

Flynn is about to scotch his confutation with, _"And are you seriously defending your harpy-in-law right now?"_ before the mention of Elsa eats the darker tissue of his brain. "Speaking of your BEAUT-iful _wife_..."

As if a thunderbolt of anger has been felt and accepted as anger by his pride, Hans narrows his eyes at Flynn.

Flynn holds his hips and looks around before squinting at Hans with a grin. "Where _is_ she, exactly? I mean, isn't she the hostess we all _really_ wanna feast our eyes on?" He starts to chuckle, but his leash-holder's crusty expression shuts him up.

"She's getting tarted up, which could take all night." Hans returns his champagne glass to his sourpuss kisser. "She has to impress piranhas like you, after all."

 _'What a curmudgeon.'_ Flynn occupies his mouth with his beignet to keep himself from saying something smart. _'It appears that he's even more attached to his trophy than he's been letting on.'_ He clears his throat and tips off, "Say now, is there any other _withheld_ info that you might wanna share with me about your lovely wife?"

"Nothing that you won't find out tonight, I'm sure. Your part in all this is in no danger of being jackknifed by Elsa as long as she takes no interest in you, which she won't."

Flynn is offended by Hans's certainty. "And what exactly makes you so sure of that? I do have a record of being irresistible to the demoiselles of the world, I'll have you know."

"Not this time."

"Maybe it's just _you_ who isn't her flavor."

"Hmph. Here's a thought: what type of women do you like, Eugene?" The redhead sounds different from the man Flynn is used to bantering with. "Eloise? Ruth―"

"Hans," Flynn stresses facetiously, "no matter how hard you try, you'll never be the type of woman I like."

Hans doesn't find him funny. "Do you _always_ have to ruin serious conversation with your two-dollar stand up comedies?"

"Well, _I'd_ say it's better than ruining something with cartilage in it, wouldn't you agree?"

" _Don't_ go making threats that you can't afford to keep, Fitzherbert. You'll find yourself rather..."―Hans delays by sipping his bubbly until he has found the most effective trigger word―" _expendable_."

Flynn cuts his eyes away to thumb his nose before sassing his provoker, "Look, do I have permission to depart for Yggdrasil or not, Your Royal Highness?"

"First things first: do you remember what I told you about working the box?"

"The box" in this conversation is a wire recorder that Hans has hidden in the mansion's "Red Room," which is where he believes Gothel will be bringing Elsa's private guests tonight. Flynn's job is to turn on the toaster-looking contraption before they get there. He also has to retrieve it after the tête-à-tête ends so that Hans can listen to the playback at his manor.

"Yeah, I remember," Flynn drones, tired just from thinking about all the CIA work he has to do. "Now can we _please_ just get this show on the road so that I can go to bed early tonight?"

"Very well." Hans abandons his wineglass on the balcony's balustrade. "If you're smart enough to heed it, you should take some advice with you. Play dumb tonight, but pretend to have the conscience of an angel even if it goes against Gothel's. She distrusts intelligent men with moral ambiguity. A boyish whore with a heart of gold is less threatening."

"Is that it?"

"Not quite." Hans is looking over Flynn's shoulder.

Flynn follows his sightline. In the shadows stands a man with a brunette on his arm. Guffawing, they walk back to the hallway before Flynn can make out their faces.

"Why don't we see ourselves to the foyer?" Hans impatiently extends, switching personalities like underwear. "Gothel would prefer it if we praised her fashionably late entrance from there."

"We?" Flynn wants to laugh out loud. "She all but said that she wants me to stay a mile away from her until I can "prove" myself worthy of flying South with her flock."

"You better get busy then."

Flynn sighs. "Fine. _Your_ con, _your_ call. I better be getting one helluva nookie after I'm done here."

To the foyer they return, where distinguishable elites can be better tabbed by Flynn. Prince Angelo, otherwise known as the only prince in the room, is warming the wall aquarium's glass with his back. Around him buzzes Senator Osborne and Mrs. Osborne, Admiral James Thornton and Mrs. Thornton, Ambassador McCarthy and Mrs. McCarthy, and a crowd of greasy toupees. The bulk of Gothel's invitees are either foreigners or Hollywoodians; the Goldwaterans, aside from the six noted, are female acquaintances who shouldn't be giving Flynn any trouble tonight if he promises to squeeze them into his new schedule. As far as his spyglass can see, the coast is all clear for dog paddling.

"Evenin', sir," a honeylike voice calls out to Flynn. "Would ya' like a suga beignet? Got a fresh batch just waitin' fo' ya."

At the offer of more sweets, Flynn turns around to ogle the beignet towers. "You _read_ my mind! Just keep 'em comin' till I pass―...out..." His sentence falls off as he takes in the girl walking out from behind the towers. "Oh," he moans under his breath. Her beautiful heart-shaped lips, maple syrup eyes, tight little figure, and chocolate skin are familiar to him. " _Don't_ I know you from somewhere?"

Hans looks back at them, but Flynn ignores him.

The colored girl in a green flapper dress goes about her business by sliding a beignet into a napkin for Flynn. "Fraid not, sir." Her quick reply means that she knows him from somewhere, too.

"I _do_ know you." Flynn points, taking the napkin. " _You're_ that singer who was bringing Velvet's whole house down last night, weren't you? _You_ , if you don't mind my saying, have the voice of an _angel._ " His eyebrows do a little tango.

Tiana pretends to enjoy his interest. "Why, thank you, sir. You're really too kind."

"Oh, well you're _very_ welcome, Miss Tiana."

Hans clears his throat, but Flynn gestures for him to piss off.

Flynn puts his arm on Tiana's tablecloth and leans into her space. "So what's a nightingale of your caliber doing all the way out here, huh?"

"Just workin' hard, sir," Tiana condenses, trying to dodge the topic. "Just workin' hard!"

"I hear that. Well, um..." Flynn knocks his knuckle on the table as he draws back. "Save the last one for me. Okay, Honey?"

"I'll try my best, sir." Tiana lets go of her facade when he sees himself out of her presence. After rolling her eyes, she returns to making more beignets with a pleasant smile.

Flynn appreciates her openly as she turns her back. He likes the elegant yet agile way her hands move as she sprinkles sugar over her beignets. Something about her grace and quiet confidence holds his attention. She's got the fiber of a princess.

Hans gets his hand around Flynn's arm and leads him away from the beignet baker. "Can you do us both a favor by not making it obvious in front of so many blue bloods that you lay down with Coloreds?"

"Relax, Rumpelstiltskin!" Flynn snatches a champagne glass off a moving tray. " _You_ , my uptight little frenemy, need to get out more. Sailing off to the gold mines of Chel Dorado and Esmeralda of Notre Dame will certainly do the trick." He keeps track of the women passing by, grinning at those who coyly check him out behind their fans. "Hi, how's your day goin'?"

"Tch!"

"What, you don't believe me, Westergaard?" Flynn discovers after his retort that Hans isn't paying attention.

" _Look_ who decided to show their face in public."

The redhead's loud disgust inspires Flynn to search for the praiseworthy source. Another redhead is coming through the crowd, one with a masquerade ball mask that gives the illusion of being both cracked and chopped in half.

"Wait~ a minute! _Isn't_ that your brother, Aloysius?" Flynn names, looking to rub it in.

Hans turns away to ask the bartender for a shot.

"You didn't tell me this was going to be a family reunion, Buddy!" Flynn revels in Hans's misery by patting him on the back while he tries to touch his shot glass with his lips. "Listen: if the rest of the litter strolls in, the next one's on me."

Hans attempts to kill him with a look. "These shots are _free_ , you halfwit."

Just then, the Wicked Witch of the West makes her grand entrance from the top of the staircase. The band stops trumpeting. Everyone turns to receive her.

"...Great God in _Heaven_ ," Flynn manages to get out.

If Gothel's red plunge dress had been any tighter, her cantaloupes would've exploded out of it. She really doesn't need to try so hard to get back into Flynn's good graces; her drop diamond earrings and lush barrel curls have already stolen his heart tonight. Tickled by the navy men's wolf whistles, Gothel seats her hands on the handrail to thank her guests for their attendance and make some smoggy speech about bringing Goldwater a new era, all the while raping people with her cleavage. Her enthusiasts and potential fappers clap. Members of the German American Bund raise their bubbly champagne glasses in salutation.

"New era?" Flynn slides into Hans's ear. "Please don't tell me that's code for "Hail Hitler.""

Hans doesn't calm Flynn's spirit; he stays in character by grinning and clapping to Gothel's mumble-jumble. His mother-in-law walks down the staircase with her middle finger following the filigree trail in the handrail. She pauses on the last step to appraise Flynn's formal wear. Flynn flinches. The fingers stroking her ruby rivière indicate her approval, a reaction that even she seems pleasantly surprised by.

Gothel scopes out the wives who are shielding their whispers about Flynn behind their fans. She smirks and flips her ringlets off her shoulder. They grow quieter than death as they watch her sidle over to Flynn, devastated by her audacity.

"Boys," Gothel greets flirtatiously. The basketballs on her chest are even more mouthwatering within a whisker of Flynn's chin.

Somehow, Hans looks at her face. "Your housewarming party is exquisite, Mother. I hope it isn't too bold of me to say that you look just as." Hans smiles at Flynn. "Isn't that right, Flynn?"

Flynn jerks his eyes up from the baby oil glistening between Gothel's breasts. "Ab- _solutely_!"

" _You_ boys look good enough to eat yourselves." Gothel slides her hands down their lapels. "Especially..."―her fingers walk up Flynn's chest―"... _you,_ Flynn Rider." She taps him on the nose, eyelids dropping lower.

" _Well_ , I...um...uh..." Flynn can't find his wits. "Thank you?" In spite of his uneasiness towards Gothel, he reluctantly accepts that her supernatural beauty, self-assured attitude, and fearless strut still give him blue balls. Perhaps jumping in bed with her will turn the tables. If all else fails, her daughter-in-law could be everything he needs to finally reach kingdom come.

"Will Elsa be coming up for air anytime soon?" Hans asks at the right time for once.

Gothel was about to fry up an excuse for Elsa's tardiness before an old man hisses an urgent message into her ear. The language that he is speaking in sounds foreign to Flynn, but Gothel understands it. She searches for someone afar, someone who probably wasn't invited to her housewarming. Flynn has never seen so much fright fill her eyes at the sight of another miscast character in her midst. The oblivious person's attendance pulls Gothel away from him without her acknowledgment of being pulled.

Hans and Flynn take notes on the man whom Gothel confronts. The average watcher might say that he has a very soulless look about him. With dots for pupils, his ice-blue eyes stare through Gothel's skeleton and straight into her vices. The curl of his pale lips hides a rather dark edge that seems capable of mowing down pedestrians without batting a lash. The black-haired little man whose face is both young and old spots them staring, and raises his glass.

Hans raises his glass back, but Flynn knows that he doesn't know this new super villain.

The gigolo breaks the ice: "Is it just me or does that smurf over there give off creepy vibes?"

"Gothel certainly doesn't appreciate his appearance." Hans looks Flynn up and down. "You'll be figuring out why soon enough."

"Gee, thanks for asking. I'd be glad to."

"Flynn!" a male voice shouts.

"Now what?" Flynn faces this unexpected turn of events to find out which testosterone-fueled creature could possibly be blaring his name with such bliss. He's more surprised to see that he recognizes the mug on the man heading his way.

"By God, I 'aven't seen you in ages!" The sandy blonde hair and overfriendly grin could belong to no one other than―

"Alfred~!" Flynn greets, faking his joy.

Alfred tugs him into a hug against his will before ripping him off by the arms. "What brings your crooked tail here? Stockings and diamonds, I imagine?"

"Ahhh, _good_ one! Actually, I'm―"

"He's the funniest epigrammatic man alive, I tell you," Alfred brags to Hans while yanking Flynn against his side. "A must-have wingman for every gala! Ennui doesn't stand a chance with 'im around." He then looks back at Flynn, gasping, "You stopped coming to my parties, you know!"

"Well, I was―"

"Aw, well, that―is― _fantastic_! Come on, then! Have a couple drinks with me. May I steal him away, Your Lordship?"

Hans doesn't know how to navigate what's happening. "Frankly, we were―"

"Splendid! To the aviary we go, then! Olga is giving a lovely tour around the grounds."

Being hauled off by a tumbleweed from the past is in part daunting and in part relieving. The military man is far more harmless than Hans. Annoying, but harmless. Flynn feels the need to tell him as they advance to Elsa's garden, "I think I might owe you one, Alfred."

"Yes, well, you fucked my wife. Quite well, I should add. Cheers to the single life. ― Oh, here then, don't look so pale. I've been waiting an entire year to thank you. I never liked my parents' taste, you see. I finally had reason to divorce the dreaded dragon and am now spending my better days at Velvet. Matter of fact, I was just there last night, basking in booze and breasts."

Flynn is intrigued. " _Really_? You and Velvet, huh?"

"Yes! You were right about that place, you know."

"Sounds like you had a blast."

"Almost, my friend. I carpooled with Her Highness and that Gothel. A plus one by way of Müller, if you will. You know him, don't you? The secret Naziphile," Alfred whispers.

"Not a clue, but keep going." Flynn doesn't care. He only wants more of the story.

"Well, the ladies were none too happy about the entire date. It seemed as if they were tolerating it to stay on Müller's good side. Anyway, we met up with a horde of other Naziphiles at Velvet and ordered Colored dancers in our suite. A Naziphile had sex with one of them right in front of us. Poor Elsa was traumatized by the whole barbarousness of the situation. I tried to comfort her, but she started crying and having something of an anxiety attack, the poor girl. I recall her briefly leaving the suite after Gothel had calmed her down. Are you alright, Flynn? Is it too warm out here?"


End file.
